Well, of course not, you are saying — don’t be silly; don’t be absurd! How were we responsible, or able to intervene in that beautifully calculated slaughter? It was just a movie, spasms on a screen, in another realm. The motel called itself Fairvale in northern California. Try looking that up. It doesn’t exist.

But I can’t help wondering whether watching from the dark has groomed us in our cold-blooded helplessness. Is it that in preferring to watch, we have felt the advancing grip of our distance, or apathy?

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Does America deserve a happy ending?

By David Thomson

***

It was the summer of 2026 — so hot in so many places, with the water running low — but there was a chill in the air.

This is how it felt. On some mornings you could say, it can’t be long now. In every amiable Fairvale we told ourselves the writing was on the wall. His approval ratings were slipping down, in the mid thirties by then. His iron support was turning rusty. His people were growing bored with him. So many were feeling short of money while he kept boasting of how rich and golden he was. His crucial gift, his energy, was on the blink.

The best year we’ve ever had! He said.

Wait for the next election, we promised ourselves, and see the joyous return to order. Is that what you said to your children, in your shower, or to yourself? As if all the spilled water and blood could be coaxed back in the bottle, and the screwtop made tight again. The way things always worked in the past.

After all, how could the greatest nation on Earth (that phrase is copyrighted, but I’ll take a chance with it) sit back and let a monster of greed and self-glory run amok? How could we not see that he was a champion in the contest for the worst ever, reliable only in being wrong about everything, a leader who hated us (because we were not him — the gravest offense in the gaze of Narcissus)? How could we stand living with him when our one protection was not a court or a congress but his constant incompetence?

No one could deny much of this. We had had time enough to get to know him. Hadn’t we voted for him twice? Hadn’t that made our idiocy clear? Wasn’t that a glimpse of our apathy, just sitting in the dark watching it all happen? Saying there’s nothing I can do.

In that summer of 2026 there was a lassitude, as if it was hard for us to get up out of our seats in the dark. We were so accustomed to whatever went on, like people in a theater watching the movie play, and knowing that some machine was grinding it out so that there was no point in crying “Stop!” or intervening. You see, no matter how profoundly the spasms on the screen may move us — and we have had lovely moments; remember Fred Astaire — still we cannot get into the picture and dance with Fred. We are only onlookers when maybe we went into the dark and took our seats hoping we were significant.

So we would be alright again (never mind great) — because to be alright is so sweet, and a chance to relax. The most annoying thing he had done was simply to block the alright and the have a nice day. He had killed ease and relaxing. He had imposed a suppressed nervous breakdown on all of us, a mixture of dismay and exhaustion, a broad daylight darkness that was always there as our phone — that faithful screen — broke the news and our hearts every day.

So lassitude set in, and we told ourselves to make the best of things before he was over, before proper transmission was resumed. And sometimes we were a little wry and fatalistic — irony can be rather cute, and it passes the time — as if to admit we knew, beyond reality and metaphor, how we were truly in the dark.

And it was part of that dark that the forces on our side could seem fragile or achingly tired. So many of us were reduced to “unsubscribe” just to be free of the daily plea of candidates who wanted a mere but constant $3, our signature, or a hundred stallions (with a matching grant for oats and the blacksmith), to maintain the fight that had to be fought. There was a decline in the number of people who turned out for more protest marches, and even marches themselves stopped happening. After all, it was a hot summer and there was allure in going to the beach and watching the endless ocean. A worry had arisen, who knew if it might be the last beach of your life? It was the summer of The Odyssey, but we stayed home.

Home was not going well, however. The organization of the opposition party — our people? — was reported in disarray. The party, the official set-up, had funding troubles. Candidates were abandoned because dead bodies and ideas had been sniffed out in their closets. The possible leaders (those who might be a new HE!) were measured in their drawbacks. And in the anxiety to win whatever contest it would be, we realized that so many suitors to Penelope were actually unsuited — because they were gay, female, black, old, young, radical, alive. Was there not one person, halfway photogenic and vacant, who could be reckoned charismatic enough to fit the bill? “How can anyone be charismatic yet vacant?” you ask. We’re getting there.

Hadn’t Joe Biden once slipped a notch or two past cognition — past being able to admit that he was no longer equipped to be our leader? Vacancy is a tricky thing. How was our opposition and vitality to get over that fatal failure, and face itself in the mirror as fit to be on a screen delivering the speeches?

***

How was any Fairvale to digest the whispered rumor that our defining laws — the documents of the great project — were like a cheese with so many holes. It was not just a matter of repeating the adage that democracy was the best of all the worst forms of government. Was it a matter of understanding that our electoral system was poised for corruption, interference and all the injunctions and dead ends that would nullify a fair election? Was it possible that the foundational principles of American originality were humbug?

More than that, wasn’t it likely that he — under pressure — would see that his only move was to declare some state of emergency. With a court that would back him up, as was its habit, or in an emergency so complete that the court itself might be retired?

There were Fairvales that said this was impossible, or ought not to be allowed — or what are we meant to do? In Fairvale the majority opinion was that it would prefer not to. Prefer not to do what? Whatever. The lassitude overlapped with a premonition of defeat or concession. Some said the protest marches are beside the point. The only thing that would impede the monstrousness was a general strike. What is that? It is a time when some kind of “everyone” takes to the street, abandons their role in the economy, and sits down on the ground to block the intersections in traffic, business and social media presence.

“You mean I have to get up and not sit down?” we ask. “I can’t stay seated in the dark? I have to take the chance that I will be seized and beaten by uniforms, that I may be arrested and put in hideous cells? That’s not very nice.”

But it may need to be done in such numbers that the arrests make their own jam of bodies as they become more than all the ICE camps can contain.

By then, or even a little sooner, he may have addressed the nation, and said he had the answer — hasn’t he always had the answers so that we were supposed to ignore the science of questions? But what he needs is an ultimate state of emergency, one that trumps all the others. A United States of Emergency. And he is not always an idiot. So he may come to the sad conclusion. “That’s what they’re telling me,” he’ll say (he can do gravity in his lamentation sing-song voice) “that the best thing about a war in a shithole desert region is that you can drop a big one without the damage getting out of hand.” Do you believe he has the grace, the charity and forgetfulness, that would hold back from that? That would prefer not to? Having to decide is a big gamble.

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By James Billot

Yes, you’re right, you can smell satire in the morning, like napalm. I’m playing at Apocalypse – and that movie genre is more popular than ever. (We can kill millions now that it’s only CGI; aren’t you nostalgic for Michael Corleone telling Robert Duvall they could kill anyone?). So summon your last courage in taking on the gamble of saying it won’t really happen, will it? Isn’t it pretty to think so?

If that amounts to realism, or madness (at the end, we won’t know one from the other), it may be clear that since 1945 at least we have been playing a game called Distractions. It has amounted to a steady face off between those who have and those who have not, between a handful and the multitudes. Or even him against all of us. I know, it’s sort of Marx Brothers that the American project should come down to a God against the rest of us. Christopher Nolan guessed it: the gods are coming home for a finale.

In our rising dismay, we don’t have to go to the movies. The big shows are out there all around us, with simple punchy titles, like Epstein or Iran. They have all been blockbusters for a weekend or two, before they get edged out for the next coming attraction, that might be Warming, or AI, or … the latest comedy? I’ll predict, it’s Arizona getting 40% less water. Let’s call it Dry.

Of course, this is fantasy, a noir romance. It could have its weekend. But the desert is waiting and watching our show. It knows it has always prevailed.

***

“Let me get this straight. Are we talking a movie or a series?”

“We’re still open at this point.”

“Open makes me nervous.”

“These are unsettling times. Christian Bale is interested in playing the producer.”

“The guy who’s putting the show together?”

“And we open it just as Trump goes into retirement.”

“This is farce, noir farce? Help me with the concept.”

“We’re saying screwball disaster.”

“And the producer, our guy, he’s having a breakdown?”

“When he has the time. Being on deadline keeps him busy.”

“Tell me about that.”

“It’s high comedy with a shot of horror. Or vice versa. We’re going to fit Olivia Wilde in.”

“Who does she play?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll cook up a girl.”

“I don’t believe I’m sitting here talking about this.”

“Got it. That’s why we want Seth Rogen playing you.”

“You’re sure Trump would do this? He looks so tired now.”

“For a ton of money he’ll do it. He wants to keep his movie going. You know how many twenties there are in a ton?”

“He’ll want script approval?”

“Know what he said — he can make you laugh — he said, ‘Makes no difference. I never follow the script.’ ”

“How many is it, in a ton?”

“Nine hundred and eighteen thou.”

“I am seeing it as a movie.”

“How so?”

“You can’t do the end of the world as a series. Not if you want to be renewed. That’s 18 mill?”

“He’s cheap at that price…”

***

AOC’s feet, appallingly, then became a “thing”. It was one of the endless instances of Cortez being harried by men’s porn-flecked fascination with her; in perhaps the most egregious, a “provocateur” comedian (reliably the worst kind) heckled her outside the Capitol, calling her his “favorite big-booty Latina”. This should have been the point at which the electorate resolved never again to comment on the hotness or otherwise of politicians, so sordid was the spectacle of an elected official being reduced to a porn category. But it was not to be; thirst for bangable Left-wing contenders continues apace. Some Democrat strategists are even chalking up the failure of the Biden era to the administration’s physical haggardness and intimate a similarly fugly future. They point to a well of unsexiness for voters’ indifference towards the party: offputting “purity politics”, too much “academic-sounding language” and a lack of “thirst-traps on the ticket” are to blame. One former Biden staffer told The Bulwark that the attractiveness of those in government had become “a foundational brunch-time conversation” in DC; put simply, “It’s easier to elect hot people.” The staffer’s hot-ness was not recorded.

Fortunately, in this shallow climate, the party is blessed with a few good-looking rising stars: the campaign for New York’s 34-year-old mayor, focused intensely on his supposed attractiveness. Remember the Hot Girls for Zohran? And the superficiality of that campaign latched on to something ugly in the zeitgeist: the looksmaxxer Clavicular famously said he’d vote for Gavin Newsom over JD Vance — a very likely 2028 ballot — because the former “mogged” the “subhuman”, “obese” vice-president with a “recessed side profile”.

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Vance responded in his own way to the looksmaxxer’s slight, telling a rally in Michigan last week that his wife Usha was 22 weeks pregnant and bragging that he was “persuasive” when she expressed doubts about carrying a fourth child. Like a latter-day Henry VIII, his prowess is predicated less on the shapeliness of his calves than on the headcount of his swelling brood. His brand of masculinity is not Mamdani’s — bashful, gentle, good-guy “allyship”; Vance conducts himself as the gruff patriarch (in guyliner), the straight-shooting sire with a codpiece to prove it. Sexual display, not pretty-boy looks, puts power over charm; fecundity — as with Pete Hegseth’s huge, blended family — is a manifesto in itself.

All this image-curation may seem like meaningless window-dressing, but physical impressions really do count. A 2010 MIT study found that participants in the US and India were able to guess, with exceptional accuracy, the outcomes of elections in Brazil and Mexico based only on a brief exposure to candidates’ photos; the groups tended to select the best-looking options and were correct that those options won between 68 and 75% of the time. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that female candidates were often deemed more attractive but were less likely to be elected than their correspondingly attractive male counterparts: fit men were taken more seriously than fit women. One economist speculated that voters preferred good-looking politicians because they “enjoy watching” them on television — “or think that they are better in social interactions”. The logic is this: in a crunch summit on nuclear disarmament, wouldn’t we rather send a young and vital charmer than a late-stage Yeltsin, red-faced and profusely sweaty?  Selecting beautiful leaders banks on their beauty translating to credibility; ugliness, conversely, must denote corruption and incompetence.

This was the reasoning that saw JFK snatch the 1960 presidential election — the first with televised debates — from a pallid Nixon who was sweating under studio lights, still recovering from an illness. The story, possibly apocryphal, goes that radio listeners thought Nixon “won” the face-offs, his experience and substance trouncing the young Democrat; TV audiences preferred this tall, tanned, relaxed Kennedy who, unlike Nixon, was nothing if not telegenic. The first framemogging, and certainly not the last.

The problem is that the symmetricality of a person’s face is hardly a guarantee of competence in office. Obviously. If the Democrats were to take this guff seriously and stuff ballots with megababes to turn voters’ heads, they risk abandoning meaning and mission while the Republicans crack on with running the country. It seems a depressing endpoint of the populist race to the bottom that any party would deliberately parachute in smokeshows just to claw back some credibility — and a catastrophic overcorrection of the Biden-era gerontocracy. Fitness for office is nothing to do with fitness: this applies as much to mumbling seniles as it does to doe-eyed himbos. Voters may be libidinous, conducting their own subconscious sniff-tests based on whether they’d personally boot someone out of bed, but this should be seen as an unfortunate inevitability and not something for strategists to hack.

Surely there’s a case to be made for the “mids”: they seem far more trustworthy than a host of twinkly-eyed slickers. Nobody wants a Capitol that looks like a casting call for The Whale, but a return to boring old expertise — and the bookish, fuss-free types who tend to have it — is welcome. I accept this may be a British instinct, given that our Parliament more closely resembles an episode of  Coach Trip than Love Island; but America is an altogether different kettle of fish and worse off for it. Here virility is pushed to almost chaotic limits; the secretaries of war and health compete to do the most push-ups (see: the “Pete and Bobby Challenge”), a far cry from Thérèse Coffey, our erstwhile health secretary best remembered for an infamous ruddy-faced night-out snap in which she chomps on a cigar, clutching a glass of fizz. But does this mean that the clean-cut, gym-hitting politicians are “better”? I’d say both six-packs and smoking are irrelevant to the job in hand.

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By Nikos Mohammadi

The problem is not that voters are shallow — this instinct is ancient and ineradicable — it is that we cannot have parties transforming into poor-man’s casting agents to fill ballots with would-be models out of desperation. If Democrats are indeed spending brunch speculating about which candidates must flash a bit of ankle to make up for their own political irrelevance, that is a sorry state of affairs indeed. With midterms around the corner, strategists will be schooling up hopefuls for the big gubernatorial races; the Republicans face real congressional jeopardy. Parties must not patronize voters, and demean their rising stars, by insisting that electoral success is all about square jaws and sexy toes. The downward spiral of populism has claimed many victims so far: complexity, nuance, moderation. Don’t let it take the uggos too.

Mamdani was a rising organizer whom I wanted to hire for my bid for the state Senate. In the New York City neighborhoods where I was campaigning, Mamdani had been the canvassing director on the City Council bid of a Palestinian pastor who nearly pulled off a stunning upset. The pastor, known as Father K, had thrilled the local youth, and canvassers constantly swarmed my apartment building. Many belonged to the Democratic Socialists of America. The concept of an openly socialist campaign winning office had always seemed far-fetched. But here was Father K, storming the ramparts. I wanted to know immediately who was working for him.

When I met Mamdani, he was intrigued by my campaign. I was a progressive Democrat unafraid of calling myself a socialist or criticizing Israel, even though I was Jewish. We immediately bonded over a shared political vision, as well as a wicked sense of humor. But hiring Mamdani couldn’t happen automatically — not because I was waffling, but because he wanted to know whether I was serious.

He needed to know if I was going to raise a decent amount of money and make my run viable. He wasn’t interested in vanity campaigns or lost causes. I respected that. I was motivated to go out and raise money, proving my mettle to my supporters and to Mamdani. In early 2018, he signed on as my field director, and he rapidly rose to become my full-fledged campaign manager.

These days, Mamdani faces a far tougher challenge than helming a state legislative campaign. He’s got to win a general election against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (again), incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, and the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa. Then he has to decide how to govern Gotham’s vast bureaucracies. Winning in November, by contrast, will be relatively easy. Some of his campaign promises, like freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments, are quite doable. Others, like raising corporate taxes or funding a $5 billion childcare expansion, will need the cooperation of a state government that may not be hospitable to a young socialist mayor. Business leaders are threatening to leave the city.

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Mamdani will also have to decide how he would govern America’s largest police force — as a Leftist who once backed defunding the police but no longer advocates for this goal. Will he retain the current NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a well-regarded, Harvard-educated technocrat who is also critical of many of the criminal-justice reforms that he backs? And what would he do if President Trump keeps flooding New York streets with ICE agents?

There is a cliché, which is mostly true, that being mayor of New York is America’s toughest job after the presidency. City Hall has a way of wearing down the titans who swagger inside. Every local ill is laid at the mayor’s feet. A DC lawmaker doesn’t have to rush to the site of a gas explosion or a train derailment, but a mayor is expected to — immediately. If a police officer is killed, he must comfort the family.

Is Mamdani up for all of this? If he beats back Adams and Cuomo, as expected — neither man is very popular — we are going to find out. He would have less experience than any incoming mayor in modern times. There’s great promise there. And peril, too.

I can think back to my own campaign, when I saw how Mamdani moved through rooms and thrilled our volunteers. He was supremely good with people, in the way you still hear folk tales told about a young Bill Clinton. His charm and gravitas, for someone of his age, was striking even then. Though Mamdani worked for me — my campaign funds paid his salary — I very much worked for Mamdani and felt driven to give every ounce of myself to the cause. This was his superpower. I would stand at a subway station in the middle of summer to pass out campaign materials at six in the morning. I would knock on doors to talk to voters seven days a week, often until nine at night. The volunteers and paid canvassers were no less driven. Everyone wanted to give themselves — to him.

A surreal moment for me came just a short while ago when Mamdani appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on the eve of the Democratic primary. Colbert pressed Mamdani on Israel and concerns about antisemitism. Mamdani is an unabashed critic of the Jewish state, a backer of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and someone who, until not very long ago, could be called an anti-Zionist. I’m sympathetic to much of what Mamdani believes and, as an American Jew, I am weary of a nation many thousands of miles away defining how I should worship or how I am viewed by the world. When Colbert asked Mamdani how he could bring together Jews and Muslims, Mamdani, who is Muslim, replied, “Many years ago, I was the campaign manager of a Jewish candidate for state Senate, and I took him to a mosque in Bay Ridge, and after he gave his speech at Friday prayers, an older Palestinian man came over to him, and he looked at him, and he said, ‘cousins’.”

That candidate, of course, was me. Indeed, Mamdani and I went to many mosques — too many to count. I was, in many instances, one of the very first candidates for office who had ever spoken with these Muslim men. (Since the prayers were segregated by gender, I also spoke with Muslim women’s groups.) At one Eid prayer, I took the microphone and spoke to thousands of Muslims arrayed on a vast field. I went to churches and synagogues, too, of course, because the district, in all its New York diversity, demanded it. Mamdani believed, urgently, that a candidate should go everywhere possible. Unlike many other Leftists, he relished the art of persuasion: knocking on the door, finding a Donald Trump sympathizer, and convincing him to take another look at a Left-wing candidate like me.

I didn’t win. We ran competitively — an uphill, underdog campaign — and came up short. I was momentarily crushed but glad, in the end, to return to my writing career, which I valued more. I knew Mamdani would get his own chance to run soon. It was merely a question of where and when. He had learned several vital lessons from our defeat. One was that building a large field operation was incredibly important. We had an army of volunteers and paid canvassers, many of them in their twenties. But other traditional tactics, like sending campaign mail, mattered, too. Since we were running out of money by the end of the race, we didn’t have the budget to dispatch those glossy mailers, which are never terribly creative but do alert voters to your presence.

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I invoked Clinton before, but there are uncanny parallels between Mamdani and Barack Obama: two young men with foreign-sounding names and African roots who upended the political establishment and won in such a fashion that few actually believed was possible. America had never had a black president, or even one who had spent less than one term in the US Senate before successfully vaulting to the White House. Obama was assailed relentlessly for his relative youth and inexperience in 2007 and 2008, especially in his bitter primary against Hillary Clinton.

Ironically, Mamdani embodies much of what Obama’s feverish Right-wing critics accused him, falsely, of being: a Muslim socialist born in Africa. Mamdani, born to a Ugandan-Indian father in Kampala, can never legally serve as president. In some form, this inoculates him from attacks from the Right, since he is hiding nothing and is rarely on the defensive. The same is true of his parentage: his mother a renowned filmmaker, his father a celebrated scholar of the Middle East. Other Leftists might run from such a background, but Mamdani never fails to acknowledge his own privilege. He is always quite direct.

One political strength and saving grace for Mamdani, ultimately, may be his fan base. No local politician has captured so many imaginations. Mayoral races don’t normally attract tens of thousands of volunteers; in the case of Mamdani, the internet became real life, with his Instagram and TikTok virality morphing into a flesh-and-blood campaign apparatus that blew away the competition. As with Trump, Mamdani’s fans are bound to stick with him, and they’ll battle for him as he slogs onward as mayor. If he does win in November, it will herald a new political era for New York and perhaps the United States. All of it, at the very least, will be fascinating to watch.

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The mere idea that Donald Trump might be compared to Charles de Gaulle will provoke howls of outrage — and not just in France. De Gaulle lived a life of austere simplicity. When his grandchildren came to tea at the Élysée Palace, he told the servants to bring him the bill for the cakes that they had consumed. He read widely and took great pains in the composition of his own books. One should never say never when talking about Donald Trump, but I feel on moderately safe ground in predicting that The Art of the Deal will not, unlike de Gaulle’s memoirs, be published in the Pléiade series that is devoted to great works of literature.

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And yet, despite their differences, both men referred, with almost obsessive frequency, to “greatness”. De Gaulle said that France cannot be herself without greatness just as Trump promised to “make America great again”. But greatness is a revealingly vague term. Leaders of states that really exercise great power — namely, Britain in the late 19th century or the United States in the late 20th century — rarely talk about it. They mask their hegemony beneath talk of cooperation and altruism. The British sometimes gave the impression that ruling the largest empire that the world had ever seen was an inconvenient burden of which they were too honourable to divest themselves.

Trump and de Gaulle both ruled — in Trump’s case will probably rule again — nations in decline. In France’s case, the decline was obvious. The country was defeated in 1940. Stirring broadcasts from London and the presence of small numbers of Free French troops in the allied forces could not change this fact. Churchill was cruel when he told his foreign secretary that the number of Canadians who had shed their blood to liberate France was greater than the number of Frenchmen who had done so, but in purely statistical terms he was probably right. After the Second World War, France lost its empire and the most dramatic moment in this process came in 1962, when de Gaulle, to the bitter disappointment of a million European settlers and much of the French army, decided that France could no longer hold on to Algeria. “High Gaullism” — the period from 1962 to 1967 — was marked by flamboyant gestures in foreign policy but the territory that de Gaulle ruled was smaller than that of the Third Republic (1870 to 1940), which de Gaulle talked of with ostentatious disdain.

American decline is more complicated. It is still the richest and most militarily powerful country on Earth. Trump’s detractors make much of his chequered business career. In truth, though, Trump’s time in business was a good preparation for leading the United States in the 21st century. The USA, like the Trump Organization, inherited much from an earlier generation, which built the country’s power and prosperity after the Second World War. But the United States is living on borrowed money because it has huge debts. It is also, like Britain and France in the Twenties, living on borrowed time. The end of the Cold War brought its apparent zenith — just as the peace settlements after the First World War brought the apparent zenith of Britain and France — and no other country is yet able and inclined to challenge America as the global power. But America’s economic superiority is finished. China’s growth may have stalled in the last few years, but everyone expects it to outstrip the United States within the foreseeable future.

Trump understands the underlying weakness of his country. Hence his obsession with the Chinese challenge and his desire to stop paying for the defence of other countries. Like de Gaulle, Trump has used a smokescreen of grandiose rhetoric to cover what is really a retreat from American commitments overseas. He understands that American greatness has become an illusion to be sustained rather than a reality to be defended. De Gaulle was also an illusionist, and it is no accident that, in their very different ways, both men were products of the television age. De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic was built on the spread of television sets in the Sixties — and state control of the national broadcast — as much as Trump’s political take-off was built on cable TV and Fox News. De Gaulle’s stage-managed press conferences and dramatic addresses to the nation in moments of crisis were as contrived as Trump’s performance in The Apprentice.

When it suited him, De Gaulle would turn a blind eye to repression in other countries if he wanted their leaders as allies. He was on an official visit to Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania when the student began tearing up the cobblestones in May 1968. Trump is equally sure that morality should have no role in foreign policy. He respects power and leaders who are not afraid to use power. If the circumstances are right, he is happy to do business with Saudi Arabia or North Korea.

Since the Second World War, most democratic leaders have had a particular emotional attachment to one country: the United States. Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Barack Obama all believed that America was a repository of virtue. There are two great exceptions. One was Charles de Gaulle. For him, America was simply a centre of industrial and military power; American idealism meant nothing. The American politician whom he most respected was not Kennedy or Roosevelt but Nixon. The other exception is Trump: a man who once, when asked to explain why he was not worried by the fact that Putin was a “killer”, replied: “You think our country’s so innocent?”

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There is, of course, one respect in which Trump and de Gaulle differ dramatically. Trump has never accepted the result of the 2020 election and did everything that he could to cling to power after it. De Gaulle, by contrast, sometimes seemed eager to leave office when confronted with the mere hint of an electoral reverse. In 1969, a cause that he supported in a referendum was defeated. This had no constitutional implications — his presidential mandate had another three years to run — but he had resigned, packed his bags and returned to his country house in Colombey-les-deux-Églises within hours.

It would, though, be too simple to see a neat division between de Gaulle the defender of democratic propriety and Trump its enemy. De Gaulle had returned to power in 1958 as the result of what was, effectively, a military coup, during which the army took power in Algeria and threatened to take it in mainland France. De Gaulle did not endorse the actions of soldiers — but those who thought that they were speaking on his behalf did so and de Gaulle never disavowed them. He told the president of the two houses of the National Assembly that, if they did not support this return to power, he would do nothing — but that they would then “have to explain themselves to the paratroopers”.

If something kept de Gaulle from making himself a dictator, it was not admiration for democracy. His last visit abroad was a trip to Franco’s Spain in the summer of 1970. Rather, de Gaulle was restrained by a sense of balance and measure. He thought that dictatorships were likely to finish badly because they would always be sucked into “exaggerated enterprises”. He anticipated that the United States itself might choose “some general” to sort things out during the chaos of the late Sixties, but that this general would probably fail.  Most of all, de Gaulle was distinguished from Trump by his pessimism about all human endeavours including, in the end, his own. He was intensely aware of the difference between de Gaulle the public man — an image that he had so carefully constructed for the French people — and de Gaulle the fallible human being. For more than a decade before his death in November 1970, his writing was frequently marked by reference to old age and the turning of autumn to winter. Somehow, I suspect that Trump — who is now one year younger than de Gaulle was at the moment of his death — is not as reconciled to his own mortality.

There is a longstanding theory that “wrestling explains Trump”, who has hosted and occasionally even performed on McMahon’s WWE shows. Vann Newkirk first made the case in The Atlantic in May 2016 and several articles with similar arguments followed. Trump had successfully navigated a chaotic primary “fight” to become the Republican frontrunner. A few months before he was elected, Jeremy Gordon asked, in the New York Times, if “everything” was wrestling. Back then, the discourse profoundly misunderstood the relationship between sport and politics. So why is it, like Trump and McMahon, making a notable comeback?

Last month, for instance, Abraham Josephine Riesman published a book that attempts to explain — to a mainstream audience — McMahon’s rise as a wrestling tycoon in relation to Trump’s emergence as a national politician. Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, argues that “neokayfabe is the essence of the Republican strategy for campaigning and governance today”. Here, “kayfabe” refers to what was an unspoken rule of the wrestling world, until 1989: that everyone pretends that the outcomes of the matches weren’t predetermined. “Old kayfabe was built on the solid, flat foundation of one big lie: that wrestling was real”, Riesman writes in a New York Times op-ed. (The “real” matches of a century earlier often degenerated into long, boring grappling affairs on the mat, eventually necessitating some fakery to spice them up.) Even outside the ring, the industry’s employees were expected to uphold the illusion that the matches were genuine athletic contests, and the wrestlers’ emotions authentic.

That is, until 1989, when McMahon publicly disclosed that match outcomes were predetermined, to evade regulatory costs imposed on legitimate sports — as opposed to mere sporting exhibitions — by the New Jersey State Athletic Commission. This revelation marked a major turning point in the industry. From then on, companies promoted wrestling as entertainment, rather than simply a contest of excellence — concentrating on storylines, characters and theatricality, in addition to the performers’ athletic prowess. Neokayfabe, Riesman writes, “rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment”. It’s not hard to see why he’s tempted to draw political parallels.

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But there are many oversimplified accounts of wrestling, and alas, Riesman’s is one of them. The “kayfabe” boundary was never strict. The audience was always at least vaguely aware of the sport’s falsity, in part due to the periodic exposes that appeared throughout the 20th century. Yet most wilfully participated in the ruse — some for fun, others to honour the commitment of the performers to the illusion. Besides, McMahon’s “neokayfabe” was merely an amplified version of what came before — an exercise in entertainment, bolstered by aggressive national marketing, branding, intellectual property protection, and numerous collaborations with celebrities.

However, Riesman, to make his point, has to oversimplify. He offers few fresh insights into McMahon’s life or career — because McMahon is intended to represent more than just himself. He is, rather, the cunning businessman who provided a “neokayfabe” blueprint that his old pal Trump adapted to craft a vivid, aggressive, and anti-truth strategy. It was this strategy that the American Right adopted, to sow discord across a country recently united by Obama’s calm, paternalistic centrism.

It is a straightforward, superficially appealing narrative — especially for those who casually watched wrestling in the late Nineties, when McMahon, with his steroidal physique and signature swagger, would confidently stride onto Monday Night Raw as the villainous boss. However, as Joe Biden might say, it’s simply “a bunch of malarkey”. Both Trump and McMahon owe their fame and fortune to something much bigger and older than both of them. Something at the heart of the American Dream: marketing.

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Marketing and advertising are America’s most original contributions to global culture. This nation, best known for refining and selling the ideas of others, has produced great evangelists, poets, and statesmen — all of them more skilled at promoting concepts than actually articulating them in any detail. The myth of America’s founding, as an uninhabited land with unlimited opportunities, served as a necessary fiction to persuade immigrants to endure a treacherous ocean journey and start anew. Americans have, ever since, been particularly susceptible to marketing strategies promising a destiny of endless prosperity.

And it was through ever-evolving marketing methods that pro wrestling evolved — from a carnival attraction with roots in the collar-and-elbow and catch-as-catch-can grappling styles imported from the United Kingdom into a multi-billion-dollar global phenomenon. These methods also transformed a portly man with a poor hair weave and a knack for composing oddly memorable tweets into the world’s most powerful leader. Trump harnessed marketing to achieve exceptional worldwide name recognition; McMahon used it to consolidate control over the somewhat disorganised wrestling industry that operated throughout the United States until the mid-Eighties, transforming the $1 million company he bought from his father in 1982 into a $9 billion sale in 2023.

The reductive comparison between the intricate landscape of US politics and the spectacle of pro wrestling is just another form of marketing. Much of the media reduces political events to us-versus-them narratives, in order to boost ratings or clicks. It’s easy to forget that politics is a multifaceted system with various influences — and that it directs all our lives. Politicians can only talk to us through the media, after all. Marketing must necessarily play a crucial role in shaping their decision-making. It took an entire team of millennials to write Hillary Clinton’s tweets, for instance.

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Politicians work on their personal brands more than most businesspeople, and promote policy positions like any other “product” in the marketplace of ideas, constantly competing to employ new tactics and technologies to reach voters more effectively. This approach is working in politics: the 2020 election saw a record number of ballots cast. It worked, too, in wrestling. In the Nineties, McMahon’s company and its main competitor, World Championship Wrestling, combined to achieve remarkable ratings, through the innovative strategies that fall under the umbrella of “neokayfabe”. But it doesn’t follow that wrestling guided politics; merely that both were guided by the eternal American undercurrent of marketing.

Indeed, comparing the producers and consumers of “neokayfabe” to politicians and voters is both misleading and condescending. While there may be some parallels in the blurring of reality and fiction, the stakes, motivations, and consequences of political actions are vastly different from those in professional wrestling. Equating the two undermines the seriousness of the political process, and to reduce Republican campaigning and governance to “neokayfabe” ignores the multitude of forces — class, race, gender, international relations — shaping political decisions and strategies. Entertainment may influence politics, but politics is not, ultimately entertainment.

Wrestling, too, is more than entertainment. Reisman’s narrative does a disservice to the sport, by telling its story through the lens of one vague concept from McMahon’s life. Pro wrestling, while diverging from its ancient roots by becoming scripted, maintains a connection to the motivations that drove ancient Greeks to compete in it: the desire to use each agon, or contest, to prove arete, or excellence, still motivates daredevil wrestlers such as Kenny Omega and Will Ospreay. The physical techniques and manoeuvres used in pro wrestling are often derived from traditional wrestling styles. And wrestlers still train rigorously to develop their physical abilities and execute complex moves in the ring — even if their performance in matches is ultimately governed by employers seeking a good spectacle.

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It’s crucial to distinguish between — rather than conflate — these forms of performance, and the consequences they have. Even seasoned political commentators, who primarily observe and analyse, can occasionally misinterpret the the sort of performance they’re watching (“Trump is just taunting us like a pro wrestler trying to sell tickets to his match; he’ll drop out soon!”), and thereby fail to understand the possible outcomes (Trump, conducting an unconventional yet highly effective political campaign, secures the presidency).

In wrestling, fan-driven publications known as “dirt sheets”, such as Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter, play a role comparable to that of Vox and Politico in politics. These publications provided insider knowledge, enhancing fans’ enjoyment of the sport. However, a fixation on firings, hirings, booking decisions and television ratings sometimes overshadows the fact that there are actual matches to appreciate. This situation parallels the way an obsession with political gossip, which bears at least a passing resemblance to “dirt sheet” reporting, can divert attention from the substance of politics itself.

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Wrestling’s deeper meaning is not found in the destructive rhetoric of its interviews or the “neokayfabe” that supposedly blurs the lines between backstage manoeuvring and centre-stage presentation, but in the camaraderie among athletes of diverse backgrounds. Gatherings such as Red Bastien’s Shootout in Dallas exemplify this, as wrestlers get together to reminisce and refer to each other as “brother”. Riesman reduces the sport, fundamentally the business of these performance-bonded “brothers”, to a mere prop for a partisan argument. Hasty to criticise McMahon, Trump, and an entire political party, the author neglects to provide an insight into the wrestling business, instead peremptorily declaring the demise of “real” wrestling and “real” Right-wing politics. In so doing, Riesman also dismisses the substance of still-extant “real” Right-wing politics and its impact on the 70 million Americans who support it — people who voted for Trump because they had faith either in him or the Republican Party.

Both modern wrestlers and Trump excel at emotional appeals — but both realms of performance are merely marketing-improved variants on carnival hucksterism. Wrestling emerged from carnival sideshows, and its goal, as with any field of endeavour that utilises sales and marketing, was to extract as much money as possible from unsuspecting customers. Trump’s continuing scorched-earth tactics — such as using his recent arrest as a means to dominate the news cycle and overshadow his chief Republican competitors for the presidential nomination — resemble short-sighted promoters who enflame fans’ sentiments for immediate gains, perhaps risking long-term destruction.

This marketing-centred approach is not exclusive to politicians and wrestlers; it is also employed by tech bros, bankers, and rappers. Indeed, marketing tactics are so prevalent in American society that it is easy to forget that, beneath surface-level spectacles, there are still some shared values and meaningful relationships. But by focusing on these deeper, more enduring aspects, we may find ourselves able to engage with everything, from politics to sport, in terms of what truly matters in our lives.

Johnson admitted in an apology, made after emails that confirmed his long-denied use of performance-enhancing drugs, that he spent thousands of dollars a month on steroids. The aim was to endow himself with a physique that implied the extreme fitness that he was attempting to sell to others. But that fitness was illusory: one powerlifter who knew him recently mocked his 455-pound deadlift, a decent number for a novice lifter or a teen boy but unimpressive for someone spending as much on steroids as the Liver King.

The Liver King’s story is a microcosm of the ever-evolving Right-wing manosphere, which emerged from self-help roots in the early 2000s to attain a quasi-political, quasi-spiritual status, alongside the ascendancy of Donald Trump. The most obvious Trump train rider in the manosphere was former advice blogger and accused rapist Mike Cernovich, who published the political book MAGA Mindset as a follow-up to his Gorilla Mindset self-help text, between blogging about topics such as grip strength when choking a woman during sex. Liver King never became explicitly political the way Cernovich did, but his message was a streamlined and extremely dumbed-down version of the MAGA-adjacent ideology being preached by anon fitness influencers such as Raw Egg Nationalist — whose alignment with Tucker Carlson led to appearances in a documentary, The End of Men, as well as on Fox News.

For all these men, there is some kind of secret — an ancient secret, in the case of the Liver King — that gullible, inward-looking initiates must uncover, via various steps. The navel-gazing nature of all this recalls the fitness fads, cults, and other New-Age quests for meaning of the Seventies that cultural critic Tom Wolfe labelled America’s “Third Great Awakening”.

The previous two awakenings concerned the revival of Protestant spirituality in the mid-18th and early-19th centuries; all three were spurred by a sense of social disorder. First, New England Congregationalists strayed from the true light of the lord that led them to the New World. Second, newly Independent Americans found themselves facing down the settlement of the frontier with little assistance from their laissez-faire government. And in the Seventies, hippies and flower children found themselves grappling with the violent disappointments of popular protests, while a bloated, bureaucratic state struggled to bring about even a stalemate in Vietnam.

Throughout these three centuries, but with increasing velocity and urgency from the Sixties onward, the personal began to substitute for the political. Now, as Malcom Kyeyune recently noted, we are in uncharted territory: now, with “proliferating numbers of belief systems and fringe political narratives on the Web”, the political is personal. In other words, the “personal” — abetted by the technologies like social media that centre the user, indeed making them the narcissistic centres of their virtual worlds — has completely subsumed the “political”; everything everywhere is personal and filtered through some sort of Freudian superego that functions as a “self-marketing machine”, with the rest of life merely incidental. Online, various quasi-faiths and crude scientism are offering people personal uplift combined with the promise to fix their little communities, the only parts worth saving, the parts open to the elect.

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Though influencers such as the Liver King, Raw Egg Nationalist, and Bronze Age Pervert are new to the scene, relatively speaking, nothing about their appeal is novel (even though certain practices, such as directing red light on the testicles to stimulate testosterone production, are only now technologically possible). They themselves emphasise this: their appeals harken back to past practices, times when “men were men”, even if they cannot agree when exactly that was. Hesiod’s age of gold? A Twenties naval port, with nattily-attired “wolves” awaiting the hearty “rough trade” from the high seas, sure to appear whenever the “fleet’s in?” A seedy Forties YMCA, where the bodybuilding demimonde has gathered to “slonk” raw eggs before proceeding to grease up and commence lifting in jockstraps? Regardless of the time of the last real men, it was very different from our present fallen, failed, and low-testosterone state of existence.

Calls for the rebirth of masculinity echo throughout recorded history, issued by everyone from the aforementioned Hesiod to Japanese author and extreme nationalist Yukio Mishima (a favourite of this current round of fitness-cum-politics influencers). The “Third Great Awakening” of the Seventies ended with the emergence of religious groups such as the Promise Keepers, an Evangelical movement seeking to call men back to “courageous leadership” and “marital” fidelity. Meanwhile, in secular literature, the breakdown of masculinity and paternal authority was addressed in Robert Bly’s influential 1990 book Iron John: A Book About Men — a text which inspired any number of subsequent manosphere efforts, including Tom Matlack’s “The Good Men Project”  (a website that launched the careers of everyone from Hugo Schwyzer and Harris “Dr. Nerdlove” O’Malley to yours truly) and even the pickup artistry of Neil Strauss and Mystery (Iron John, like Robert Greene’s works on power and seduction, found itself on many “PUA” reading lists).

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I mention my personal involvement here — the personal is political, after all — because I’ve followed the manosphere’s trajectory since the early 2000s. I’ve also spent decades strength training and eating raw meat and raw eggs, as well as interviewing and writing about some of the world’s leading strength coaches and athletes. These activities would suggest, on the surface, that I am sympathetic to the cause of egg-slonkers, bronze-age warrior worshippers and bodybuilding aesthetes. Far from it: I see their Liver King-style marketing as sophomoric, the sort of thing I’ve attacked in print whenever possible.

My interest in strength stems solely from viewing it as preferable to incapacity. The enjoyment I’ve derived from weight training arises, to quote venerable strength coach Mark Rippetoe, who I recently interviewed, from “completing a task you couldn’t do previously”. And yet, throughout my career as a journalist covering sports and fitness, I have been asked what I have learned from figures such as Raw Egg Nationalist. When I interviewed the paleo diet influencer John Durant, during the early days of the alt-Right’s emergence as a media phenomenon, he assumed I shared his belief that eating raw or rare meat is a radical political act. I do see it as political, but only in the sense that I stand with politicians who support regenerative grazing practices and increasing access to meat for poor and undernourished children; meat is merely a means, not an end. I’d gladly eat something less primal, including biologically identical lab-grown meat, if such a thing could ever be manufactured cheaply and at scale.

That’s not to say that these fitness influencers don’t offer some useful advice. All popular gurus and spiritual leaders do. Eating organ meats, getting adequate sleep, spending time in the sun, and even taking some pride in one’s body — an edifice that is both temple and tomb — are not bad practices in and of themselves. However, this advice is chained to a lot of gobbledygook, from bizarre, hero-worshiping misreadings of history to faux-scientific racism. The noted dissident author Zero HP Lovecraft, for instance, once used a voice changer to record a podcast in which he argues that the different races are different species.

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It is almost impossible to say how influential these figures are; on the one hand, they will claim that they directly created the Trump phenomenon, but on the other, they will joke that they’re just “frogs” who “shitpost online”, unlike the “facefags” (people whose identities are public) who genuinely care about things. Bronze Age Pervert, whose book Bronze Age Mindset is the sort of amusing Nietzschean pastiche one might expect from a PhD student having a spot of fun, is known to be read by congressional staffers; and yet, he huffily complained about City Journal allowing Kyeyune to publish an article that’s mildly critical of him. Like the Liver King, these figures take zero responsibility for the failures and shortcomings of their acolytes — but unlike him, most of them will never be seen at all, so what difference does it make?

Here, then, is the great weakness that stems from the evolution of “the personal is political” into “the political is personal”: far from allowing the development of strong convictions, the new creed is so malleable as to be meaningless. If one argues that the job of the Republican Party is to win elections and reward its constituencies, those on the Right who preach that “the political is personal” won’t help. Why would they bother? Most are already arguing that the nation or the world has collapsed, which is far easier than facilitating real political change, which would require moving the GOP to the centre.

Things are fairly hopeless, according to the manosphere. Yet if pressed, the Liver Kings and Bronze Age Perverts won’t turn on, tune in, and drop out like millenarian hippies bound for the commune; they’ll hang around, continuing to offer advice on how to infuse the self into politics and vice versa. They and many of their followers — some of whom left the Left by way of the so-called “post-Left” — would gleefully ridicule such “personal-political” posturing were it to issue from gender identitarians or committed anti-racists. Zero HP Lovecraft, however, says the quiet part out loud (in the same podcast in which he compares white and black people to wolves and coyotes): if one side is doing racism, then we will do racism as well.

This is the grave danger behind the very online Right’s turn towards “the political is personal”: at the back of the ironic fitness, the talk of physiognomy, and the IQ-test silliness, there lurks an us-versus-them mentality. And it’s a mentality that allows the manosphere to gleefully join the progressive Left in bidding farewell to any of the remaining civil norms that facilitate debate and compromise. It will do nothing to break the sclerotic gridlock in the body politic — and nothing, ironically, for the young men of America who are actually trying to get stronger.

***

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Whether Roosevelt’s Republic properly ended with the social chaos of the late Sixties or with America’s victory in the Cold War, and whether we are therefore currently living in the Fifth, Sixth or arguably even the Seventh American Republic, is the type of question that future history students in Beijing or Singapore are bound to contemplate on their final exams. The more immediate point is that another American Republic is collapsing, and also that we’ve been here before. In recent years, as in the Sixties, we’ve seen the take-over of large sections of American cities by armies of drug-addicted zombies, riots in Washington, dirty political tricks by the FBI and the CIA, the capture of universities by militants obsessed with race and gender, dire warnings about the fate of the planet, and the wholesale abandonment of American military allies. The difference between now and the Sixties is that today the people with Angela Davis posters on their walls are living in gated communities, rather than communes.

More troublesome, however, than the sight of America once again shedding its skin, is the shape of the American Republic to come — and the question of whether it will be a republic at all. Since the end of the Cold War, America has transformed itself from a country in which most citizens proudly imagined themselves to be “middle class” into a bi-coastal oligarchy. The hallmarks of this new republic’s politics are the sorts of pathologies that used to be associated with the countries to America’s south: a wildly unequal distribution of wealth, choking bureaucracy, paranoid mass politics, the weaponisation of the security apparatus, and the merger of monopoly capital and invasive state bureaucracies.

The beginning of the current crisis can be dated to the election of 2016, in which a large majority of voters expressed their rejection of the American socio-political order by voting for either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump over the neoliberal establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. Trump’s election was followed by coordinated attacks on his flailing presidency by large sections of the American power structure, including the national press, corporate monopoly internet platforms, and a security apparatus that used the press as a megaphone for a series of conspiracy theories and lies that were often spread under cover of anonymity. The media’s already-tattered credibility with the public was plunged into the toilet.

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This toxic combination of widening political polarisation and institutional failures was contaminated further by the country’s disastrous response to Covid-19, which crushed small and medium-sized businesses while padding the profits of large investors and internet-based monopolists. The result was the largest single transfer of wealth in American history since the Civil War, and the disenfranchisement of a significant portion of the American middle class — accompanied by a steady drum-beat of “woke” discourse that gleefully demonised the losers as “white supremacists” and “insurrectionists”.

The election of Joe Biden in 2020 was supposed to restore the legitimacy of the American political system and bring a measure of social peace. Instead, President Biden went in the opposite direction, attacking his opponents as “white supremacists” and “fascists”, setting the FBI on domestic foes, and endorsing a banana republic-style raid on Trump’s home.

Yet to blame America’s woes on either the 79-year old Biden, who strikes even sympathetic domestic observers as senile, or Trump, who continues to be a font of ugly and delusional politics, is to dangerously mistake the nature of the crisis. America’s toxic partisan politics are a symptom of deep changes in the American socio-economic structure that date back to the early Nineties, in the aftermath of America’s victory in the Cold War — when President Bill Clinton set out to take Reaganomics global with a series of trade deals that included NAFTA and GATT, and destroyed the American middle class that Roosevelt and his successors created.

From the standpoint of the Democratic Party of the Nineties, Clinton’s trade deals were a huge success, bringing major sectors of Wall Street and large American corporations into the party camp. For traditional Democratic constituencies such as industrial labour unions and their members, they were a disaster, permanently depriving millions of Americans of their jobs and turning large swaths of the country’s industrial base into rubble-strewn reservations for zombified meth-heads.

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Among the writers, thinkers, and reporters who tried to analyse the travails of the American working and middle classes during Bill Clinton’s presidency, perhaps the most acute was the Pentagon-linked geo-strategist Edward Luttwak. For Luttwak, the problem with America wasn’t market capitalism or the failure of American workers to compete with their peers in Mexico and China. Rather, it was the unholy conjunction of Right-wing libertarian Reaganomics with selfish Left-wing baby boomer mantras about free trade, technology, and open borders.

What both the Left and the Right shared, in Luttwak’s analysis, was their disdain for the kinds of Bismarckian social bargains that keep states strong. Luttwak called the unholy alliance of the libertarian Left and Right “Turbo-Capitalism”, and he warned of its disintegrating effects on the American middle class, which he saw as the foundation-stone of American stability, prosperity, and geo-political dominance.

In his concern for the disintegrating American middle class of the Nineties, Luttwak was hardly alone. The troubles of middle-and-working-class Americans were a common theme during that era among a cohort of perceptive American thinkers including Robert Bellah, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Lind, Robert Putnam, and Robert Reich. What made Luttwak a rarity among his peers, Lind excepted, was his embrace of European-style welfare state capitalism in the context of an overtly nationalist politics — ie the American status quo before the Reaganites and the Clintonites set out from different directions to destroy it.

The America of the Obama-Trump-Biden years now looks a lot worse than the America that alarmed Luttwak and Lind in the Nineties. At the top of the narrowing social pyramid is a tiny class of mega-billionaires who personally own and control a staggering percentage of the country’s wealth, resources, and power, and make their money from the globalised economy. Then comes the professional class that services the billionaires, ranging from highly paid lawyers and investment bankers to chefs and fashion designers and real estate salesmen. Below them is the servant class of bureaucrats, teachers and other lower-status employees whose salaries are paid by the state or non-governmental organisations and foundations, who funnel money back to their political patrons in the Democratic Party in the form of free campaign labour and contributions.

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Finally, there are the working poor, many of whom formerly considered themselves “working class” or “middle class”, but who are now forced to rely on government programs and subsidies covering everything from rent, to school tuition, to health care, to food. The glue that holds this power vertical together is the Democratic Party, which now regularly outspends the Republican Party — an incoherent mix of Trumpists, Christians, and other socio-economic losers — by margins of three or four to one.

In addition to being an oligarchy, the new American social pyramid is also a gerontocracy, in which both political power and wealth are wildly skewed in favour of people above the age of 60. Biden (79) and Nancy Pelosi (82) lead the Democrats, while Trump (76) and Mitch McConnell (80) lead the Republicans. Where the average American over the age of 55 has a net worth of somewhere between $1.2 and $1.5 million, the average American adult under the age of 35 is worth approximately $75,000, with the vast majority having no significant assets at all.

Understanding the new America as a decaying oligarchy run by old people is essential to understanding the increasingly bizarre mutations of Left and Right in American politics. The “Left”, in the United States, now represents the new oligarchy and its dependents. The resulting “Left-wing” preferences for free trade and open borders in turn make it impossible for American workers to earn a living wage. The fact that the new American Left is funded by billionaires such as George Soros (92) and Warren Buffet (91) ensures that Left politics is focused not on decent pay for workers but on the ever-mutating math of woke identity politics.

In place of tangible goods, such as a living wage and the chance to buy a home, groups of dispossessed Americans are offered official “recognition” of an ever-expanding set of “identities” rooted in race, gender and sexual preference, which pits them against other groups of Americans who suffer from much the same woes. Wokeness, as an ideology, can be seen as a function of the ascendent Turbo-Capitalist order — a means for controlling the working and middle classes to ensure that they can’t unite against their increasingly all-powerful masters.

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The digital technologies on which the new American mega-fortunes are based offer historically unprecedented opportunities for surveillance, censorship, and social control — and have allowed the oligarchs who own them to merge with the state. Jeff Bezos of Amazon, for example, owns the Washington Post, which the security apparatus used as a megaphone to spread the Russiagate conspiracy theory to undermine Trump. Amazon also holds a lucrative cloud computing contract to manage all the CIA’s data, which it administers from a centre in Northern Virginia where over 20,000 people work, many of whom were formerly employed by the government. While tech giants such as Oracle and Palantir have large contracts with the US security apparatus, public-facing companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter regularly censor news and opinions at the behest of the White House while funneling private user data to the security services for free.

If techno-monopolists have merged with the security bureaucracies in Washington, the human instrument of elite control is the “professional-managerial class”, which forms the backbone of the lay Democratic Party. But how did this relatively narrow group of lawyers, professors, teachers, nonprofit workers, bureaucrats, and lower-level editors gain the power to anathemise, exclude, condemn, and generally lord it over much larger sectors of the population?

One answer is its ability to leverage digital tools, particularly social media — a medium in which small numbers of activists can wreak havoc on hundred-billion-dollar corporations or prestige institutions. By this logic, the Woke is a vanguard movement that seized control of a new technology and used it as a force multiplier to discipline and terrorise the larger institutional landscape.

A more subtle version of this answer is that woke-ists use the threat of reputational damage to impose uniformity of opinion on the class of people like themselves, whose careers exist only insofar as they are backed by sufficient reputational capital. Unlike previously dominant forms of capital (like, say, land and cows), the reputational capital that is the professional class’s stock in trade — the ticket to the next job or fellowship — can be vaporised by a single tweet. In turn, the uniformity of opinion that the woke imposes within its own cohorts allows it to control those cohorts, and use them to bend powerful institutions to its will.

This explanation of wokeness, though, is to imagine that the tail is wagging the dog. But, media companies have stockholders, just as universities have wealthy and powerful trustees to answer to. These stockholders and trustees should be more powerful than broke 20-somethings with Twitter accounts. Surely, at some point, market forces should begin to punish institutions that chose to ignore reality. If Princeton University, say, were to embark on a programme of persecuting faculty who dissent from faddish doctrines, then those faculty members — and the donors who support them — could migrate to Harvard, which would accumulate money and prestige at Princeton’s expense. But that never happens. Not just institutions of higher education, the entire professional layer of society — from the professions, to corporate management, to non-profits, to media and publishing — moves in lock-step.

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By Park MacDougald

So who does control the new American system? The answer isn’t broke woke-ists. It’s the monopolists who own the platforms where the woke-ists live. Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett and Sergei Brin and Larry Page and Lorraine Jobs don’t care about mean tweets. They care about the hundreds of billions of dollars in their bank accounts, their lavish mansions and private jets, and pursuing rich person hobbies like colonising Mars. Their primary political goal, as a class, is to prevent the state from ever getting strong enough to tax their fortunes, break up their monopolies, or interfere with the supplies of cheap immigrant and offshore labour from which they profit. The more fractured, dejected, and heavily surveilled the America public is, the less likely a strong state is to emerge.

In the contest between the oligarchs and the fading Rooseveltian state, the woke are a useful tool— not an independent power. They are the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party, whose job it is to organise the dispossessed into groups that are narrow, factional, and divided enough that they can’t come together into a force that threatens oligarchical control. Discontent with the Turbo-Capitalist order can be usefully turned against anyone who refuses to follow the ever-changing party line — beginning with the “deplorables” who are now regularly portrayed as murderous, undemocratic racists and fascists, and extending to JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood. The result is a closed circuit in which Turbo-Capitalist oligarchs and Woke activists make common cause against formerly independent institutions like universities, professional associations, and the press. All of these institutions rely on guarantees of individual and collective rights by the state, which the Turbo-Capitalists and the Woke seek to capture and use as an instrument to enforce their own privatised social bargain: everything within the Party, nothing outside the Party, nothing against the Party.

The unprecedented reach of the technologies that the new oligarchy commands has already destroyed the press and replaced it with a government-corporate censorship regime that has no parallel in peacetime America. Combined with what appears to be a healthy appetite for humiliating others, this power does not bode well for the future of social peace in America, or for the health of the next American Republic.

A year on, how should we evaluate Biden’s declaration? Well, the Taliban has reinstalled a tyrannical theocratic government under which the precious freedoms gained by Afghan women over the past 20 years have been completely reversed. If the “best decision for America” involves trampling liberty and solidarity underfoot, then I don’t want to imagine what the worst decision would look like.

More tangibly, we were told that the Taliban would no longer harbour terrorists — Biden promised in his withdrawal speech “to make sure that Afghanistan can never be used again to launch an attack on our homeland”. And yet, as Barbara Elias warned last year, this is not a promise the president had the power to keep. Links between the Taliban and al-Qaeda were and are too deep and strong to be severed. Elias cited worrying intelligence assessments that al-Qaeda could become a real threat to the US again as soon as 2023.

Her warning was vindicated two weeks ago, when Biden announced the successful killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor as leader of al-Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri was killed in Kabul in an apartment rented by an aide of Taliban Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani. Haqqani, in turn, is the leader of the Haqqani network, a Taliban offshoot that the Wall Street Journal has called the group’s “most radical and violent branch”. The Taliban claimed they were unaware of Zawahiri’s presence in the heart of their capital, a statement that knowledgeable observers have rightly called out for its sheer effrontery.

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No doubt the truth about the current relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda will come out in due course. But the reasonable conclusion is that the two groups are still comfortably in bed with one another, and that al-Qaeda is once more using Afghanistan as a staging ground for its nefarious activities. We should welcome the killing of al-Zawahiri, of course, but his being found in Kabul gives the lie to Biden’s justification for the Afghanistan withdrawal.

In that withdrawal speech, Biden argued that “the real choice” was “between leaving or escalating”. This was a false dichotomy. America could have just carried on. Yes, perhaps Afghanistan was a very long way from becoming a proper democracy, but it would have been relatively inexpensive to keep a small force of a few thousand stationed there for a few more years, a fraction of the 100,000 troops stationed there in 2010–11. Even before the 2020 peace deal, US casualties in Afghanistan had been extremely low for years, with fatalities averaging in the low double digits since 2015. A small US force would have been more than enough to keep the Taliban out of total power.

From today’s perspective, however, it is no longer possible to view Biden’s withdrawal and the chaos that has ensued as a strategic error, however grave. You come back from errors, you reset and correct course. Instead, I have come to see the Afghanistan debacle as something more alarming: the result of a complete lack of strategy, or even the basic contours of a plan. What we have seen over the past year has been nothing other than chaos disguised as policymaking.

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At home, for instance, Biden took office promising to reunite a polarised nation. That went out the window last Monday, when Donald Trump’s residence was raided by the FBI less than 100 days from the midterms elections — allegedly over violations of an obscure record-keeping statute. Since then, prominent Republicans have accused the administration of parallel systems of justice, drawing comparisons with Third World countries. Who can blame them? The FBI barely made a case of Hilary Clinton’s lost cache of emails and an at-home secret server, and while federal prosecutors are investigating Hunter Biden for potential tax fraud (to say nothing of the shenanigans documented on Hunter’s infamous laptop), no one has yet seen fit to raid the First Son’s home.

Even more remarkable than the raid itself are the reports that Biden was not aware of it before it happened. Sending FBI agents to occupy the home of a former president — and Biden’s potential opponent in 2024 — is an unprecedented step. It will be politically explosive even if the bureau turns up evidence of wrongdoing, which is no guarantee given that the press, the Democratic Party, and various agencies of the US security state have investigated Trump’s alleged criminality again and again to little avail. That such a potentially destabilising step could be taken without Biden’s knowledge is almost literally unbelievable. If true, it would mean that the president is barely in charge of his own government.

This absence of a plan is also evident in Biden’s handling of Ukraine and Taiwan. Although the president deserves credit for the massive aid he has sent to Ukraine, he has repeatedly risked escalating the conflict with off-the-cuff remarks that contradict official US policy. During a visit to Poland in March, he seemed to call for regime change in Russia, inadvertently threatened to use chemical weapons, and appeared to tell American troops that they would soon be fighting in Ukraine. These comments were later clarified or “walked back” by Biden’s gaggle of minders, raising questions about whether Biden himself is the one making the decisions.

Then there was Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan. When reports of the trip began to circulate, so too did the speculations about why she was going at such an awful time. Did Biden approve of Pelosi’s trip, or was she going against his wishes? The latest reporting suggests it was the latter. If she had been backed by Biden, then, as Thomas Friedman put it, Biden would have been signing off on “something that is utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible”. Instead, it seems that Biden was simply unable to stop Pelosi from doing whatever she wanted.

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What explains this potentially tragic comedy of errors? Perhaps, in part, it is a result of the Democrats’ desperate need to distinguish themselves from Trump. If Trump was unwilling to risk war over Taiwan, then Team Biden must be ready to go there. But wanting to come across as different is hardly a vision.

Trump’s personality made him unfit for office, and the events of January 6 have left a stain on America. But the Trump administration had some real foreign policy achievements under its belt, not least the breakthrough Abraham Accords. When Trump brags that neither the war in Ukraine nor the crisis over Taiwan would have happened if he had been re-elected, he is credible. For all his colourful personality, there really was a Trump domestic policy vision and a foreign policy doctrine.

The same cannot be said of his successor. A year on from the Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden’s doctrine remains nebulous and disjointed, to the extent it doesn’t appear to exist at all. More and more, the Afghanistan disaster epitomises his entire administration — chaotic, ill-planned, and papered over with high-flown rhetoric that has little to do with the reality on the ground.

***

Editor’s note: This piece was written before Salman Rushdie was attacked on Friday — a subject which Ayaan will be addressing in her next column.

These new school paranoiacs divide into two camps: a progressive one and an anti-progressive one. While diametrically opposed politically, they nonetheless share the same conviction that the sin of their enemies is everywhere and must be vanquished to save the soul of America. And, like all moral panic entrepreneurs throughout history, their deepest concern centres on the purity of young people, who they claim are being “groomed” into demonic tribes, whether of the Left or Right.

The liberal version of apocalyptic alarmism is by now all too familiar: the broad gist of it is that Donald Trump is a tyrant who has unleashed the atavistic and peculiarly American impulses of white rage that will inevitably lead the country to civil war and ruin — unless he and his base are repelled by the valiant Democrats. In his bestselling book On Tyranny, published just after the 2016 election, Yale historian Timothy Snyder sternly warned that America could descend into fascism under Trump. By the time Trump had all but completed his first term in office and was seeking another, the liberal prophets of doom had gone into overdrive. “I can’t say this more clearly,” Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times in late September 2020. “Our democracy is in terrible danger…”

The events of 6 January served to confirm their darkest warnings: it was an attempted coup! It didn’t matter that most of those who broke into the Capitol had not the slightest idea what they were going to do once they got inside the building, or that the only lethal shot fired during the whole ludicrous debacle was at a Trump supporter, or that there was zero chance that Trump would be violently returned to power. It didn’t matter that Trump, despite new testimony that he wanted to join the protesters in marching toward the Capitol, had scurried back to the White House, where he returned to his usual state of lethargy, or that one of the defining traits of his presidency was ineptitude. None of that mattered, because it complicated the preordained narrative: Trump and his supporters are an existential threat to the republic.

Once Biden moved into the White House you would have thought that the apocalyptic fantasy surrounding Trump would have eased up a bit. It didn’t, and the crack-pipe of progressive paranoia soon flared up again. In May last year Slate published a piece on how “Trump Is Planning a Much More Respectable Coup Next Time”. But the crack-pipe was at its hottest in the editorial traphouse of The Atlantic, which ran a cover-story in January proclaiming that “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun”.

More recently, the US Supreme Court’s decision to revoke Roe v. Wade has served to refocus progressive premonitions of doom. The Guardian reported that the revocation of the 1973 ruling, which enshrined Americans’ constitutional right to abortion, “could drive the biggest wedge yet between what appear to be two irreconcilable nations coexisting under one flag”. “Some wonder if the country’s social fabric, frayed by four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, can survive.”

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A persistent thread in much of this alarmism is a deep preoccupation with children and their “safety”. The concern is not so much that children, or indeed their children, will grow up under tyranny, a “terrifyingly real” prospect according to Snyder. The fear, rather, is that children might become the tyrants: they are in danger of being “groomed” into fascist little monsters, whether it be through video games, Instagram or even online fitness groups. And if you don’t treat extremism like it’s a virus and inoculate your kids against it, then you’re part of the problem.

On the other side are the equally shrill and hyperbolic anti-progressives, who think the Democrats and their supporters are trying to stage a socialist coup by stealth and that anything but Republican rule will spell disaster for the country.

Trump’s style, of course, was nothing if not apocalyptic. In the run-up to the 2016 election he had warned, invoking one of his favourite rallying points, that: “Right now, we don’t have a country, we don’t have a border.” By the time the next election came round, he was warning about the existential threat of Biden. “He’ll bury you in regulations, dismantle your police departments, dissolve our borders, confiscate your guns, terminate religious liberty, destroy your suburbs,” Trump thundered at a campaign rally in late October 2020. On Twitter, he said that the election was a choice between the “TRUMP BOOM” or “Biden’s plan to kill the American Dream!”

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In a recent article in The Washington Times, David Bossie, a conservative activist and long-time Trump adviser, declared that the “Democrats are purposefully trying to destroy our country as we know it in their quest to change America into the world’s next failed socialist state”, citing the rise in violent crime across American cities and the incursion of critical race theory into schools as “part of the Left’s grand plan” to destroy America as we know it.

Bossie didn’t mention children, but many conservatives in America can’t keep off the subject, believing that legions of Left-wing activists and sexual deviants are “grooming” children into the cult of woke zealotry. “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centres for gender identity radicals?”, Fox News host Laura Ingraham demanded to know earlier this year.

A few months ago, the focus of the story shifted to how Disney had positioned itself as one of the country’s preeminent grooming hubs. According to The Federalist: “Disney’s Obsession With Grooming Children Is Nothing New, But Their Openness About It Is.” More recently, the focus has switched to taxpayer-funded Drag Queen Story Hour events at city schools. “Progressives may have no problem with child grooming and sexualisation, but I do,” protested Vickie Paladino, a New York City Council member.

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What explains the current upsurge in apocalyptic alarmism and its insistent encroachment into the centre of American political life?

Part of the answer is that it’s strategic: sounding the alarm about impending catastrophe is what political partisans do, especially if they can’t persuade a good number of people on the merits of their policies. And, of course, alarmism about extremists has been used everywhere by politicians of all stripes to clamp down on critics and infringe their rights in the interests of “security”.

Alarmism is also a well-rewarded grift, especially for extremism experts and journalists who have perverse incentives for amplifying threats. In a recent article on the new-Right in America, James Pogue made the point in this way:

“Someone like me who has made a career of writing about militias and extremist groups might go about my work thinking that all I do is try to tell important stories and honestly describe political upheaval. But within the Cathedral [Curtis Yarvin’s phrase for an amalgam of universities and the mainstream press], the best way for me to get big assignments and win attention is to identify and attack what seem like threats against the established order, which includes nationalists, anti-government types, or people who refuse to obey the opinions of the Cathedral’s experts on issues like vaccine mandates, in as alarming a way as I possibly can…”

Another possible explanation for the rise of apocalyptic alarmism is the warping effect of spending so much time looking at extremist material on the internet. As someone who studies violent extremism as part of my job, I’ve thought a lot about how over-exposure to violent imagery and hateful propaganda can affect the mental health of those who do this work. Some researchers and journalists claim to have been traumatised by what they have seen, while others worry about the spiritual harms they may have incurred.

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But I also wonder whether those who spend so much of their time in highly radicalised online spaces might slowly, bit by bit, succumb to the warping impact of that exposure. If all you do is read online forum posts praising the murderous actions of Elliot Rodger, you just might start thinking that men really are monsters or potential ones, in the same way that if all you do is watch extreme porn, you just might think that women are sexual objects to be used and humiliated. Or, if all your news about woke liberals comes from the derangement porn of Libs of TikTok you just might start thinking that demented woke people really are everywhere and bent on destroying Western civilisation.

The problem with apocalyptic alarmism, whatever its stripe, is not just the self-aggrandising melodrama that usually accompanies it, or the hypocrisy of sounding like the “semiotically aroused” fringe the alarmists loath. It is its lack of proportion and basic common sense. As Matt Welch has noted: “the moral of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ is not that there is no wolf, but rather that warnings should be saved for when the beast actually arrives.”

On this issue, the Democratic Party assumes the mantle of righteousness. Who could oppose “life-saving” “gender-affirming care”? Who supports “conversion therapy”, which the Biden administration described as “a discredited and dangerous practice that seeks to suppress or change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQI+ people”?

The reality diverges sharply from the loaded language the Biden Administration deploys, lifting terms directly from the most radical trans activists occupying positions at the outermost extreme of an ongoing debate between different factions of gender clinicians.

The dispute over how best to treat gender-questioning children that the Biden Administration seeks to resolve by enshrining “gender-affirming care” and stigmatising “conversion therapy” boils down to whether or not clinicians regard the children in their care as exceptions to everything we know about child development, human biology, sexual orientation, and more. Attending closely to the language of the activists with whom the Biden Administration has sided provides a masterclass in how to manipulate language to normalise risky and invasive medical intervention on a class of people — children — who are widely understood to be unable to provide consent in other contexts.

For exploratory providers, a child’s transgender identification is the beginning of a clinical inquiry that will travel through the individual patient’s biography, their social context, and the templates the culture at large offers that young patients use to make sense of suffering. Nothing magical or transformative happens when a patient experiences gender dysphoria or expresses a transgender identity. Children and adolescents remain children and adolescents. Clinical practice does not overthrow itself when a young patient changes her pronouns.

For affirmative clinicians, on the other hand, the declaration of a transgender identity and the desire for a particular gender presentation suffice. That’s what affirmation means: no further inquiry required. A transfer of loyalty takes place when affirmative clinicians are confronted with “trans” children and adolescents: clinicians’ sense of responsibility shifts from the patient in front of them to the patient’s transgender “alter”. Doctor and patient then collude to slice and drug the patient’s body into compliance with the new identity regime.

Across the Atlantic, countries such as Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom are stepping back and shifting away from hormones and surgeries and toward exploratory psychotherapy as evidence of harm mounts. It’s remarkable that the United States government has chosen this moment to double down, without reference to serious inquiries underway at home and abroad.

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Rather than bending the arc of history toward justice, the Biden administration has put the full force of the federal government behind a treatment model that amounts to little more than an unregulated medical experiment on vulnerable children and adolescents. Don’t let the language of civil rights fool you.

To understand gender affirmation and the people who push it, we need to take a closer look at their belief in the utterly exceptional “transgender” child. What do affirmative clinicians believe about such a patient, who arrives in their office with a label firmly affixed? Affirmative care starts not with a question or a clinical assessment but with a moral imperative: validate the patient’s transgender identity.

Presented with a “transgender” patient, what else matters? Does a patient’s age or developmental stage matter? What about his or her sex or sexual orientation? What parts of a patient’s life story — or medical history — stand out?

Gender clinicians such as Johanna Olson-Kennedy prefer to talk about gender-questioning three-year-olds as “people”. And they are people. But when we talk about three-year-olds as “people”, rather than toddlers, important information gets lost, with consequences. When we talk about “people”, we think adults. We think autonomy. When we talk about “toddlers,” we think: tiny humans who need constant care and guidance, who cannot be trusted to brush their teeth or cross an empty street, much less start down a medical pathway.

That’s the reason Olson-Kennedy talks about “people” when she’s referring to toddlers. The ideas that underpin gender-affirming care lose their moral force when translated from “people know who they are” to “toddlers know who they are”.

What about sex and sexual orientation? As recently as the mid-2000s, medical providers understood cross-sex identification in childhood and adolescence to be a normal stage of homosexual development, resolving in the majority of cases as the child moved through adolescence and became comfortable with his or her sexual development and sexual orientation. Long before the concept of gender identity took root, the idea of being “born in the wrong body” resonated with many young gays and lesbians — not to mention medical providers, who viewed homosexuals as “inverts” in need of psychological or surgical “correction”.

Affirmative providers overlook, downplay, or outright deny the overrepresentation of same-sex attracted youth among youth seeking transition. But clinicians who rate the “gender presentation” of “transgender” preschoolers on a scale from stereotypical girl (fitted, sparkly, frilly) to stereotypical boy (baggy, sporty) inevitably sweep up children whose rejection of gender stereotypes is rooted in their same-sex orientation. Affirmative providers such as Diane Ehrensaft argue that “prototransgender youth use [same-sex] sexual identity as a stepping-stone toward their transgender true gender self”, a rhetorical move that overwrites the connection between homosexual development and gender dysphoria, and equates accepting your same-sex sexual orientation with pursuing irreversible medical interventions.

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Much like their views on same-sex attraction as a “stepping stone” toward a young person’s “transgender true gender self”, affirmative providers treat just about any mental health comorbidities as secondary to gender dysphoria. Suicide attempts, psychotic episodes, anorexia nervosa, depression, anxiety, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, experiences of sexual abuse and trauma, and substance abuse aren’t taken as reasons to question or delay transition but instead are treated as evidence for the need to accelerate transition.

In order to grease the skids, affirmative providers have invented or adapted a wide range of new medical concepts, all of which operate to obscure what they do from the public and from providers themselves,  scrambling the complex clinical presentations they need to parse — and manipulating patients, parents, and policymakers. These concepts include “wrong puberty”, “sex assigned at birth”, “reconstructive surgeries”,  and “internalised transphobia”.

Reconceptualising patients as “wrongly sexed” (thus in need of reconstructive relief) and giving allegiance over to the patient’s transgender “alter” over the physical patient and her social and medical history skew clinical assessments and lower clinicians’ barriers to providing experimental medical interventions. Girls become “boys”, not in reality, but in the way gender clinicians talk about reality. Elective double mastectomies on girls become “reconstructive chest surgery” on “boys”. Exploratory therapy to understand where distress over sex and gender originates becomes “conversion therapy,” something no ethical clinician would practice. Drastic, life-altering medical interventions — such as “pausing” puberty and all the cognitive, physical, and emotional development that goes along with it — become conceptualised as non-interventions on the one hand, “life-saving” on the other. In any case, language becomes detached from reality, skewing risk analysis.

This language of determined identities and autonomous “people” speak to the way affirmative clinicians see their role: deferring to patient self-identification and facilitating hormonal and surgical interventions to bring patients’ bodies in line with how they want to “wear their gender”, Meanwhile, activists inside the medical profession push for policy changes to lower the age at which minors can consent to transition — a priority of the forthcoming guidelines from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health — and remove requirements for parental assent. California legislators are on the verge of passing a bill that would equate denial of “gender-affirming care” with child abuse, a move advocates say would turn California into a “sanctuary state” for trans-identifying children.

Ask for stronger evidence or stricter safeguarding measures and you’ll get an earful about suicide and self harm: affirmation is a “matter of life and death.” (Never mind that researchers had to cook bad survey data at extremely high temperatures in order to make such dire claims.)

Affirmative clinicians frequently compare gender dysphoria to endocrine conditions such as diabetes. Take Johanna Olson-Kennedy, dismissing the need to explore the causes of a young person’s distress over gender: “I don’t send someone to a therapist when I’m going to start them on insulin”. Never mind that medical providers can test for diabetes (and monitor whether the treatment is working), while relying on patient testimony to initiate medical transition. Never mind that untreated diabetes kills. Analogies to cancer also abound, especially when clinicians need to justify serious risks like permanent loss of fertility and the very real possibility that patients will lead shorter, sicker lives after medical transition. Ask clinicians and they’ll tell you that gender dysphoria, like cancer, is a life-threatening condition. In the absence of supporting evidence, this is emotional extortion, nothing more.

Affirmative clinicians evade the possibility of regret and detransition. They prefer to talk about “gender fluidity” or “gender journeys”— “journeys” that may include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and elective double mastectomies. Journeys that could not and should not have been avoided, in other words.

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Affirmative providers also cleave to a narrow set of explanations about why patients experience regret and detransition, pinning regret and detransition on lack of social support for the patient’s transgender identification. By placing the blame on factors outside the medical system, providers avoid the suggestion that regret and detransition may be the result of inadequate evaluation or inappropriate medical interventions. This interpretation also keeps patients firmly within the ideological framework that underlies affirmative care. Under this framework, a patient remains “really transgender”, even if external factors conspire to keep the patient from living out that identity. Even if the patient disavows their transgender identity entirely.

***

If affirmative providers’ belief in the exceptional “transgender” child bears out, we can make a strong case for affirmation. But if this belief is merely an article of faith, nothing more, clinicians risk doing serious harm to their patients under the banner of affirmation. In other words, if gender-dysphoric children and adolescents are truly exceptions to everything we know about identity formation, child and adolescent development, how humans make sense of distress and their susceptibility to social influence, the role of sexual orientation in gender dysphoria, and more, then affirmation may be the right approach.

But what if supporters of gender-affirming care are wrong?

What if children who identify as transgender are just that: children? What if they hurt, like other children? What if they’re trying to figure themselves out and learn how to navigate the strange world they live in, like other children?

What’s changed are the ideas and expectations that we’ve raised children on and the way we’ve turned them loose in an online world whose terrain no one has mapped. Many of these children have grown up with extended experiences of online disembodiment. They may not be free to run around outside with their friends but they’re free to roam the darkest corners of the Internet. Who knows what strangers and strange ideas they encounter there.

These children have grown up hearing a very new and confusing set of fairy tales about gendered souls that can end up in the ‘wrong bodies’. Adults who should know better — adults who do know better — have made these children impossible promises.

Children who identify as trans aren’t sages. They aren’t sacred. They haven’t been endowed with wisdom beyond their years. It’s not fair to treat them as exceptions to the safeguards we place around children, so that when they grow up and change their minds and ask why we let them do this, we say: You wanted it. You asked for it. You were so sure. What else could we have done?

There’s a way in which everything that touches trans must be exceptional — the children, the stakes, the feelings, the possibility of knowing anything for sure — because if these kids aren’t exceptional, then we threw everything we knew out the window. We didn’t ‘help’ exceptional children but harmed ordinary ones, struggling with ordinary challenges of development, sexual orientation, identity, meaning, and direction.

Triumphalism and horror abound, but both responses are a distraction. While it is difficult to predict exactly what Musk will do with Twitter (he has announced his intention to soften content moderation and make the algorithm open-source, but only time can tell on both), what his purchase represents is considerably clearer: it is a major flashpoint in the shift from a centralised culture of public elites to a more decentralised, chaotic, and devolved world.

In this context, debates about free speech and accountability miss the point. There was nowhere near this much panic when Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post in 2013. Nor, for that matter, do people worry about the fact that Warner Bros Discovery owns CNN or that Comcast owns MSNBC. So why all the hoopla about Musk?

There are two reasons for the excitement. The first is related to Musk himself: his perceived character and affiliations. Elite media and progressive circles tend to regard him as more dangerous than Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos not because he is richer or more powerful, but because he is more culturally aligned with various deplorables, from crypto-bros to MAGA-heads to Joe Rogan.

This perception helps to explain the fretting over Musk’s claim to be a “free speech absolutist”, which human rights groups have warned could usher in a torrent of online hate. But whether or not you think unrestricted free speech is a good thing, it is unlikely to be put into practice. There is widespread agreement that unmoderated public forums are completely unmanageable due to trolling and abuse, and any administrator of any social media platform will have to engage in some filtering or censoring. The worry is about what kinds of speech he will and won’t let through.

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The second reason relates to Twitter’s tenuous role in preserving an established national elite in an age in which the very idea of such an elite is dying. Twitter has in recent years, just like the internet itself,  bifurcated into two broad strata: a national “overculture” of elites — academic, celebrity, political, or journalistic — and a more shadowy, disparate “underculture” of often-pseudonymous hoi polloi, who increasingly define themselves in opposition to the traditional elites.

For many years now, the undercultures of Reddit, 4chan, and other online forums have made the idea of a respectable, professionalised online discourse more difficult to maintain. And the ability of the underculture to mobilise masses of anonymous users to push against the elevated voices of the overculture has shaken the established media culture to the bone.

This dynamic was on display last week in the conflict between Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz and the formerly anonymous Libs of TikTok Twitter account. The landscape of the battle was an indication of the overculture’s weakening position. When an anonymous account holds enough influence to not only merit mention by the Post but rally an online army against the journalist who exposed her, the elites have lost a great deal of the power that makes them elite.

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Twitter, perhaps unwisely, made the bifurcation explicit when it introduced the Verified tag on accounts — the infamous “blue tick” letting users know that “an account of public interest is authentic”. In practice, the blue tick has become a pejorative marker to those who see Twitter as having catered to their more prestigious users while blithely censoring unverified users. (Disclosure: I am a verified Twitter user.) Blueticks, in turn, have to face the rage and mockery of the unverified hordes, proving that notability is no guarantee of respect. Some of the most successful of them, such Elon Musk and Donald Trump, have gained huge followings by railing against the very class to which they belong.

For an elite like Musk to disavow the overculture is tremendously dispiriting, even traitorous, to his fellow elites, and that is why his purchase of Twitter has provoked so much consternation. In an earlier age, the concentrated force of media, academic, and corporate elites could have overpowered Musk’s takeover bid. Enough of the players would have known each other that it would have been possible to close ranks to defend the overculture by expelling Musk from its ranks and declaring him toxic to all. Today, however, Musk has been able to pose as an anti-establishment figure in the vein of Trump, thereby gaining the backing of the underculture simply by seeming to be opposed to elites. That backing has been sufficient to leave any overculture objections in the dust.

Twitter has been paralysed for years. Some critics have attacked Twitter for not capitalising on its tremendous prestige, but these attacks downplay the immense difficulty of the company’s position. Twitter tried to be a voice for both the overculture and the underculture simultaneously, letting the two intermingle. That made Twitter uniquely valuable for forging connections that were not possible on Facebook or Reddit, but it also made it sclerotic. It was impossible to please both cultures. When Musk blathers on about free speech, what he is truly saying is, “Twitter has favored the elites too much; I will not do that.” That does not equate to more free speech, only to a different alignment.

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Do we need Caesar Elon Musk?

By Mary Harrington

If Musk immediately lets Donald Trump back on Twitter (and Trump returns), that by itself will be seen as a flashpoint in today’s culture wars. Media elites have long complained of Twitter not doing enough to stamp out abuse and assorted wrong opinions. Letting Trump back on the platform will be shorthand for giving the middle finger not to those who hate Trump but to those who fought so hard to get him off in the first place. Yet the irony is that Twitter only banned Trump on January 8, 2021, by which point he had already used the service to win the White House and demagogue his way through the presidency. Like NBC and CNN, Twitter turned on Trump only after he had successfully exploited their platform. It was yet another example of Twitter following rather than leading, unable to please its wide and insufficiently-cloistered constituencies.

Musk will face the same problems. Though he owes little to the overculture at this point, keeping the underculture happy will not be trivial. He is not a Trump who can throw red meat to his base — he will instead have to balance between underculture sects which, once they perceive the elite to be sufficiently marginalised, will start turning on each other. Musk will doubtless decide that such wars aren’t worth his time. If that happens, the future of Twitter may not look so different from its past and present: a stagnant purgatory, albeit one with fewer blueticks.

It’s easy to see why the images of the debris, a very pandemic-era combination of online shopping and urban lawlessness, received heavy play on local news and spread far and wide across the web. So bad was the litter problem — caused by systematic robbery, with criminal groups pilfering packages, ripping them open and running off with the most valuable goods — that a cargo train had derailed just a few days before Newsom’s late-January visit. And so here was the state governor, in jeans and a t-shirt (and a cloth mask outdoors) in a litter-picking photo-op: an irresistible visual to add to the thick dossier on Democratic misrule in California.

But the bluntness of Newsom’s reaction — as well as comparing his own state to a third-world country, he explicitly blamed organised criminals — was a revealing sign of this safely Democratic state’s changed political landscape.

Put simply, such statements might have been a political headache for a California Democrat only 18 months earlier. With the country in the throes of its post-George Floyd “reckoning” — dominated by a mood of hypersensitivity around anything relating to crime, policing, race and any combination of the three — references to the third world, as well as daring to be seen to be tough on crime, might not have gone down well. But Newsom received only fringe pushback.

In California’s two biggest cities, the signs of progressive retreat are everywhere. The extent of that retreat, and the question of exactly what comes after years of Leftwards shift, will define the political future of America’s most populous state.

In the past two years, London Breed, the Mayor of San Francisco, has performed a dramatic about-turn on crime and policing. In 2020, the city chief cut $120 million from the budget of the San Francisco police department. Yet a year later, she asked for emergency extra funding for the police and announced a crackdown on crime in the Tenderloin, the city’s most lawless neighborhood which operates as an open-air drug market. It was time, said Breed, to end the “bullshit”. Now she is doing battle with the city’s progressive forces to deliver on what, anywhere other than San Francisco, would be considered a reasonably common-sense clampdown given the scale of the city’s drug overdose and crime problems.

And she is far from alone. The campaign to recall Chesa Boudin, the city’s progressive prosecutor whose short time in office has been a disaster, was started by a group of local activists and quickly developed serious momentum. Campaigners secured enough signatures to force a citywide vote, which is scheduled for June, and look increasingly likely to triumph. A mid-February survey found that 68% of San Francisco voters planned to vote Boudin out of office. (That in a city where just 6.7% are registered Republicans.)

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Is this the end of progressive America?

By Joel Kotkin

Campaigners in another recall push in the city found success last month when voters ousted three members of San Francisco’s school board. 70% of voters opted to ditch officials who seemed more interested in what to rename the city’s schools than figuring out how to reopen safely during the pandemic. (Among the names they hoped to erase from the San Francisco schools: George Washington, sitting Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and author Robert Louis Stevenson.) As part of her tack towards the center, Breed has supported the recall campaign.

A few hundred miles to the south, a group of Angelenos have taken inspiration from the anti-Boudin campaign and hope to oust LA’s head prosecutor. The move to recall George Gascón is in its early stages, with campaigners recently given the all-clear to start collecting signatures. But things don’t look good for Gascón, who is cut from a similar, hyperprogessive cloth to Boudin. Like Boudin, he has overseen a lethal slide towards lawlessness. And, like Boudin, he faces a furious internal revolt from his prosecutors. In a recently published internal survey by Los Angeles Association for Deputy District Attorneys, nine in ten prosecutors supported the recall effort. “Over a year ago, Gascón began a massive social experiment by redirecting prosecutorial resources away from enforcing the law while simultaneously ignoring large portions of the legal code,” said its vice-president Eric Siddall. “The result is an emboldened criminal element that knows the DA will not hold criminals accountable. This experiment needs to end.”

Even before a single vote has been counted, the anti-Gascón campaign has already changed policy in the city. In an effort to fend off the backlash, he has reversed two of his landmark policies: a ban on trying juveniles as adults and on seeking life without parole.

Meanwhile, in the crowded race to replace Eric Garcetti as the mayor of Los Angeles — Joe Biden has appointed him as the US ambassador to India — the mood is unmistakably moderate. Homelessness, crime and the cost of living dominate the debate. Karen Bass, a former congresswoman and the pick of the city’s Democratic machine, has swerved Rightwards, with a policy platform that features clearing homeless encampments as a prominent promise. This has dismayed the city’s progressives, who complain that she is “pandering to affluent Westside and Valley voters at the expense of black, Latinx and working-class ones”, as two Black Lives Matter activists put it in a recent column. (Needless to say, LA’s working-class voters, whatever their race, are by no means as on board with a far-Left approach to criminal justice as the authors claim.)

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By Michael Shellenberger

Meanwhile, Rick Caruso, a billionaire former Republican, has thrown his hat into the ring. Caruso, a shopping mall developer, is a big beast in LA civic life: he is a trustee at the University of Southern California and has been a member of the city’s Police Commission. In a statement confirming his switch from Independent to Democrat, he said that he “won’t be a typical Democrat… I’ll be a pro-centrist, pro-jobs, pro-public safety Democrat.” Caruso has backed the Gascón recall campaign. (Bass has not.)

The counterrevolution in California’s cities may seem fairly mild by national standards: a shift in tone among the same class of Democratic politicians. But the backlash on America’s left coast demonstrates the outer limits of tolerance for radical progressivism in American politics. As the novelist Wallace Stegner noted, California is like “America, only more so”.

When it comes to experiments in far-Left urban politics in recent years, that has undoubtedly been the case. Now the question is whether Californian Democrats have learned anything but the most shallow lessons from the last few years. It is one thing to acknowledge that “Defund the Police” is political kryptonite and nudge public safety spending back up. It is another to face up to the grave problems facing your city.

Voters are watching closely as the likes of Breed, or whoever is chosen to replace Garcetti, try to clean things up. A nod to the centre might be enough to spare short-term political disaster. But it will likely take more than that to actually solve the problems that have voters so frustrated.

What is this, I thought? What portal had I fallen through? I’d been raised on 1010 WINS, “all news all the time,” blaring the same rotation of headlines, weather, traffic, and trivia, in 40-second increments, for hours at a stretch. The piece that I had happened on that day went on, improbably, for over 20 minutes.

The program I was listening to was called All Things Considered, on a network with the unfamiliar name of NPR, short for National Public Radio. I was immediately hooked. In no time flat, I’d put it on whenever I was home. Morning Edition as soon as I opened my eyes, All Things Considered when I got back in the afternoon, Fresh Air during dinner. I fell in love with Robert Siegel’s wit, Renée Montagne’s voice, Scott Simon’s charm. These people got me. They shared my interests, my outlook, my sensibilities. For the first time, I felt myself reflected in the public sphere. “NPR,” I put it to a friend a few years later, “is my home in America.”

And that’s the way it was for over 30 years, through the advent of Talk of the Nation and This American Life, of On the Media and Here & Now. NPR became the soundtrack of my life — when I drove, cooked, ate, exercised, did laundry — three or four hours a day, every day.

That is, until around the beginning of last year. My discontent had been building since the previous summer, the summer of the George Floyd protests. It was clear from the beginning that the network would be covering the movement not like journalists but advocates. A particular line was being pushed. There was an epidemic of police violence against unarmed African-Americans; black people were in danger of being murdered by the state whenever they walked down the street. The protests were peaceful, and when they weren’t, the violence was minor, or it was justified, or it was exclusively initiated by the cops. Although we had been told for months to stay indoors, the gatherings did not endanger public health — indeed, they promoted it. I supported the protests; I just did not appreciate the fact that I was being lied to.

But it wasn’t just that story. Overnight, the network’s entire orientation had changed. Every segment was about race, and when it wasn’t about race, it was about gender. The stories were no longer reports but morality plays, with predictable bad guys and good guys. Scepticism was banished. Divergent opinions were banished. The pronouncements of activists, the arguments of ideologically motivated academics, were accepted without question. The tone became smug, certain, self-righteous. To turn on the network was to be subjected to a program of ideological force-feeding. I was used to the idiocies of the academic Left — I had been dealing with them ever since I started graduate school — but now they were leaking out of my radio.

Nor was it only NPR. One by one, the outlets that I counted on for reliable reporting and intelligent opinion — that I, in some measure, identified with — fell in line. The New York Times, which was already in an advanced state of decay, surrendered completely. Ditto The New Yorker. The Atlantic was drifting in the same direction. Inroads appeared in The New York Review of Books. Satirists whom I admired for their alert sense of irony, their ability to recognise the absurdity at all points of the political spectrum  — Stephen Colbert, John Oliver — got the new religion, and started preaching sermons. 

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“Moral clarity” became the new journalistic standard, as if the phrase meant anything other than tailoring the evidence to fit one’s preexisting beliefs. I was lamenting the loss, not of “journalistic objectivity,” a foolish term and impossible goal, but of simple journalistic good faith: a willingness to gather and present the facts that bear upon an issue, honestly and clearly, regardless of their implications.

For months, I felt trapped, alone with my incredulity. Was I the only person seeing this? Every time I turned on NPR, my exasperation grew — basically, I was hate-listening after a certain point — but what was the alternative? I literally couldn’t think of any. Then, by sheer dumb luck, I was invited on a podcast to discuss a book I had recently published. It was The Unspeakable, with Meghan Daum, and while I had never thought of myself as a podcast person, I so enjoyed myself, was so impressed with her intelligence and humour, that I became a listener.

I quickly discovered that there was another person seeing what I had been seeing, and not only seeing it, but talking about it: frankly, fearlessly, incisively, in public. And not only one person. For I also discovered, from references she dropped, that there were other podcasts like hers, ones where things you weren’t supposed to talk about were talked about, where things you weren’t supposed to say were said. But how was I going to find the time to listen to them, on top of all that NPR? And then it came to me: I could just stop listening to NPR.

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By Park MacDougald

So that is pretty much what I did. Now, in addition to The Unspeakable, I listen to Blocked and Reported (Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal), The Dishcast (Andrew Sullivan), The Glenn Show (Glenn Loury, with John McWhorter as a regular guest), Honestly (Bari Weiss), and LibertiesTalk (Celeste Marcus). I don’t agree with everything these people say, still less with everything their guests do. Weiss is on the centre-Left, Sullivan and Loury on the centre-Right, but more to the point, all of these figures are heterodox, which means that their positions aren’t predictable.

But I didn’t start listening to them because I felt I had a civic duty to expose myself to opinions I disagree with. I started listening to them because I couldn’t stand the bullshit anymore. Because I needed to let in some air. They make me think. They introduce me to perspectives that I hadn’t entertained. They teach me things, and they are usually things the Times or NPR won’t tell you.

I have learned about the lab-leak hypothesis before it became an acceptable topic of discourse. About the lunacy of transgender orthodoxy (“affirmative therapy” for small children, the “cotton ceiling”). About the real statistics on police killings of unarmed black people (according to a Washington Post database, the number shot to death came to 18 in 2020, 6 in 2021). About the truth about Matthew Shepard (who was murdered, by a sometime lover and another acquaintance, over drugs), Jacob Blake (who was shot while stealing his girlfriend’s car, kidnapping her children, resisting arrest, and trying to stab a cop), and Kyle Rittenhouse (who worked in Kenosha, had a father who lived there, and was out that night, however misguidedly, to protect property and provide medical assistance).

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More broadly, I have learned of the emergence of an alternative ecosystem of independent-minded journalists, experts, and thinkers, many of them exiles, voluntary or otherwise, from the established media. They are free of institutional allegiances. They are unintimidated by the Twitter mob. They are committed to free inquiry and free speech. They are unafraid of debate. For the first time in a good long while, I feel myself reflected in the public sphere. I have a home, once again, in America.

We talk incessantly these days about political polarisation. Americans are hunkered down in our camps, we say, in our tribes. We are blue versus red, urban versus rural, secular versus religious. But wherever there are tribes, there are individuals who leave their tribe: renegades, heretics, converts; expatriates, emigrants, exiles. The late, great anthropologist David Graeber remarked that despite what we tend to believe about pre-modern social formations — that they were self-enclosed and inescapable — some five percent of their inhabitants, on average, left their group.

So it clearly is today, whatever the exact percentage. We rarely talk about this, but we should. It would help us perceive that our tribes, mentally and socially, are not so inescapable, so self-enclosed. That we have options. That there aren’t just two camps. That you do not have to join a camp at all. Because most of the people who leave one, I would venture to say, do not join the other. They become, as we say, politically homeless: anti-Trump conservatives who do not recognise what’s happened to their movement or their party; progressives, like me, who are disgusted at the spectacle of what progressivism has become.

But maybe the most important reason to talk about the existence of today’s political renegades and ideological heretics is to enable each of them, each of us, to feel less lonely. To live within a tribe is to enjoy the reassurance that you’re one of many. To leave one — to break one’s attachments, to call down the condemnation of one’s peers and friends — is necessarily to feel that you’re alone. But you are not alone.

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So why do people leave? How do they change their minds? Different ways, I think. There is the lightning conversion, the stunning realisation that everything you’d previously thought is wrong, and everything you’d thought is wrong is right. Today that sometimes seems to happen to individuals who are raised in restrictive religious environments and who find themselves exposed, accidentally or otherwise, to the scepticism and relativism of the secular world — though obviously the road to Damascus can lead in the other direction, the direction of faith. There is the opposite experience: the feeling not that you have changed but that your tribe has — something that many are feeling with respect to one or other of the major political formations. There is the slow accretion of countervailing information that eventually leads (gradually, then suddenly, like Hemingway’s bankrupt) to a change in one’s view of reality, the way a scientist changes their mind.

But for me the most important way, and not just because it is the one I find most salient for me, is this. You change your mind when you consent to stop ignoring things you know full well but do not want to think about — things that you push to the edges of consciousness, or all the way out. Few of us are scientists. We do not gather facts through careful, ordered processes; we aren’t compelled to make our arguments in formal terms in front of expert referees. Our thinking is less about finding the truth than about making ourselves feel good. And so when we encounter a countervailing piece of information, an uncomfortable truth, we dismiss it as an anomaly, or as not undermining the general point, forgetting the previous “anomalies” and not regarding how they might together utterly destroy the point.

To overcome such a block, to look in the face an unwelcome reality, is first consternation, then liberation. Anyone who’s been in therapy will understand this. The truth always feels good, on a certain level, just because it is the truth. It relieves us of the psychic stress it costs us to resist it.

A few examples from my own thought. Some concern the recognition that we on our side are not any better, in many respects, than those scoundrels on the other. Yes, conservatives are making common cause with authoritarian regimes, but only lately did I let myself acknowledge that the Left has done the same for many years: with Cuba still today, Nicaragua in the 80s, North Vietnam in the 60s, the Soviet Union in the 30s. Yes, Republican leaders are cowards who refuse to denounce the Trumpian extremists in their ranks, but only recently did I allow myself to see that many leaders on the Left are equally spineless, equally faithless, equally complicit in the face of the extremists on their own side. For a lifelong Leftist pushing sixty, admitting this is, as Joe Biden might say, a big fucking deal.

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By Kat Rosenfield

But those are just examples, and they and others like them add up to far more than the sum of their parts. For knowing now how wrong I think I’ve been about so many things, knowing too that outlets and authorities I trusted have been, at the least, not telling the entire truth, and sometimes outright lying; knowing furthermore that others, ones to which I’m not “supposed” to pay attention, might supply the fact or argument that challenges another unexamined assumption — all this has been, to use one of Daum’s favourite words, destabilising. She started her podcast, she’s said, because she doesn’t know what to think anymore, and when I first heard her say that, I smugly dissented. No more. There are plenty of issues on which I still possess a firm opinion, but there are none, I now believe, on which my opinion cannot be overturned.

History is changing, fast. Stabilities are fracturing; intellectual borders are shifting. New movements have emerged, impelled by hidden emotional currents, impelled in turn by forces economic, technological, environmental. But history, I’ve learned, isn’t just something that happens out there. The upheavals it causes are psychic, as well. I had read about this with respect to people in the past, but now I find that I am living it. But that is the thing about history: we always think of it as happening to others, until it comes for us.

***

NOTE: I originally wrote this essay for a different publication. It was one with which I’ve had a long and fruitful relationship, and the editor-in-chief, who is retiring, invited me to contribute to his valedictory issue. His initial reaction was positive, to say the least. “Like all your best pieces,” he wrote, “and like many of the other best pieces I’ve run, this one makes me a little scared, but also makes me excited by the prospect of waking people up. It wakes me up. I’ve felt some of this without ever quite admitting it to myself.”

 This, I should say, was according to plan. While politically neutral in theory, the journal had been drifting in the same direction as the rest of the mainstream media. Waking up his readers, whom I doubt had ever heard this kind of argument before, was exactly my intention.

Alas, it was not to be. Two weeks later, the editor wrote me again. “[T]he more I’ve thought about it, the less comfortable I’ve become with associating [the journal] with many of the assertions you make…. [T]here is too much in your piece that I could not defend.”

I had written a piece about the truths we aren’t allowed to utter on the Left, but that truth too, apparently, must not be uttered. The editor, it seemed, did not appreciate the irony. – W.D.

First, you had to rely on the local newspaper to tell you where the event was even located. The report was based on sources who “spoke on the condition of anonymity” — as though the venue of a public presidential campaign rally was some sort of state secret. In trying to gain entry to the event that afternoon, I encountered a police officer who informed me that “pre-registration” had been required to attend, even though there was no publicly-available information as to how to “pre-register.” Finally, a Biden volunteer spilled the beans: the event was really open only to “party officials and donors.”

Now, this can supposedly be attributed to the Biden campaign’s hyper-cautious approach to the Covid pandemic. And there’s probably some validity — both political and epidemiological — to that rationale. But it’s still peculiar, and one might say disturbing, that public campaign events during the final phase of a presidential election have been effectively privatised under the auspices of virus control, as though that were the only option to ensure social distancing. If the price of mitigating virus spread is giving in-the-know elites another tier of special access to engage in the electoral process, that’s quite a bleak (and self-interested) tradeoff.

And there are more cynical interpretations of the Biden campaign’s tack here, because it’s an open question as to whether the general public would be interested in showing up to his events in the first place. Donald Trump, for his part, is still holding rip-roaring rallies several times a day like nothing’s changed since 2016. In Luzerne County that Saturday afternoon, Trump supporters far outnumbered Biden’s as they gathered en masse on the outskirts of Biden’s own event, with the goal — successfully accomplished — of shouting loudly at Biden’s motorcade as it entered the high school where the “drive in” event was taking place. They also drowned out the small cohort of Biden supporters who did manage to gather on the perimeter, shouting additional pleasantries at them like “Pedo Joe” and “Where’s Hunter?”

Granted, Luzerne County saw some of the biggest shifts to Trump anywhere in the country in 2016, helping him win Pennsylvania overall in a jarring upset, so you’d expect there to be an “enthusiasm” disparity there. The county was perhaps the national epicenter of electoral trends in de-industrialised, heavily white, economically adrift areas of the US that delivered an upset victory to Trump — he received a full 35% more raw votes there than the previous Republican nominee Mitt Romney did in 2012, which was an astonishing shift over just four years, even as raw population in the county steadily declines. And much of that support remains fully in tact. But still, the scene that day was so weighted against Biden — again, at his own event — as to be comical.

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By Ian Birrell

If nothing else, the 2020 campaign will test the theory that on-the-ground, observable, in-person enthusiasm is any kind of significant determinant to a national election outcome. And in fairness to whoever’s calling the shots in Biden-land, there’s already some tentative reason to believe Biden’s unprecedentedly hands-off approach may work. Even pre-Covid, during the Democratic primaries, the scant attendance at Biden’s campaign events and his paucity of paid campaign staff became a recurring object of ridicule. But then he ended up winning states he’d never set foot in by wide margins, blowing out candidates who’d raised and spent far more money.

Conversely, Trump’s swashbuckling rallies across the country in 2016 were routinely sneered at by journalists as self-indulgent wastes of time, but these rallies likely did have an appreciable pro-Trump impact in electorally crucial areas such as Northeastern Pennsylvania. Home to outsized proportions of white people with less educational attainment — the percentage of residents who possess a college degree in Luzerne County (23%) is well below the national average — voters there had an observably specific cultural affinity with Trump. And while that affinity remains — they have no qualms about displaying it with huge TRUMP flags attached to huge pickup trucks barrelling down the road — the question is whether this continued enthusiasm will be overridden by other segments of the electorate newly energised in opposition to Trump.

Either way, some humility on the “enthusiasm” issue is warranted, especially given the country’s mass transition to entirely new methods of election administration, whereby huge percentages of ballots are being cast well before Election Day. A member of the “Bikers for Trump” group which bombarded the Biden event, when asked who he foresaw winning Pennsylvania, replied: “If it was just regular votes, Trump. With this mail-in bull crap who knows.” (The man declined to provide his name.)

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I also spent some time in nearby Scranton, PA where Biden was born, a fact he mentions constantly, and which provides an easy, cliched backdrop for a tedious number of journalistic inquiries into the state of the race in Pennsylvania. Though the city and surrounding county still lean Democratic, Trump also made enormous inroads there in 2016. Directly adjacent to the Biden campaign office in downtown — at which you can mosey in and pick up a slightly drab-looking “BIDEN” logo face mask — sits a shoe repair shop owned by Barry Lawrence. The interior of the shop is in partial disarray, and posted depressingly to its door is an eviction notice signed by a county magistrate.

Lawrence told me he was unable to operate his shop for approximately four months in the initial stage of the pandemic, and his landlord refused to cut him a break on rent. This was made all the more harmful because he said he didn’t know how to apply for one of the so-called “PPP” loans made available by the CARES Act, which was passed in March to support shuttered small businesses. But even as he’s now able to open his store back up, it’s barely made a dent. He’ll have to vacate just two days after the election.

“Business is dead,” Lawrence said. “People are still thinking about the pandemic. Nobody wanna be out.” He accepted a Biden/Harris campaign placard to put in his storefront window, though when asked about his candidate preference expressed no particular pro-Biden enthusiasm. “We need something better than what we have,” he said, almost mournfully.

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Whether Trump himself can rightfully be blamed for Lawrence’s inability to get the loan is debatable, but one can’t deny that prolonged Covid-induced dread isn’t very helpful for the incumbent. Especially for voters who’ve made every effort to abide by mitigation protocols in their own lives, while Trump has a somewhat spotty track record in that regard. For the record, face masks were required for entry to a “Trump Victory” campaign office in Montgomery County as of Sunday, October 25, which apparently is not the case in the White House — site to at least one known “super-spreader” event. Montgomery County, a diversifying Philadelphia suburb, is among the few places in the state that actually trended Democratic in 2016, and that’s where Biden’s campaign is banking on boosting turnout to overcome Trump’s likely sky-high margins in rural areas — areas where, it should be said, mask-wearing is considerably less embraced.

Luckily for Biden, volunteers hardly even have to make an affirmative case on his behalf, when the “negative” case (against Trump) is so all-consumingly dominant in the minds of Trump’s opponents. Jeanne Boland, a Biden campaign volunteer from Scranton, said she hadn’t bothered getting involved in the 2016 election but now was going all-out after four year of being inflicted with what she clearly felt was a non-stop series of Trump-related horrors. “Honestly, I thought Hillary was a lock,” she recalled of this time last cycle.

And out of what she said were hundreds of interactions she’d made over the preceding several days, Boland “only talked to one voter who actually said that they haven’t made up their minds yet.” This is borne out in polling data, and also makes the “final stretch” of this election (to use another pundit cliche) seem altogether different from 2016, when there was a palpable sense of fluidity in the waning days of the race. Now, you either want Trump in, or you want him out. A binary question. Biden is almost a side-story. Voters seldom mention him — it’s all Trump, all the time.

An older woman exiting an early-voting polling place in a largely black area of Northeast Philadelphia on Monday, having just checked the box for Biden, was asked to rate the candidate’s performance over the course of the campaign. “Sufficient,” she said. This is amusing for anyone who can remember the rapturous enthusiasm engendered by Barack Obama in 2008, and even to large extent in 2012 — particularly (but by no means exclusively) in black neighbourhoods. Hillary Clinton’s failure to rouse comparable enthusiasm was a significant contributor to her loss four years ago. This time, though, Trump appears to have provided all the enthusiasm — pro and con — that anyone needs. And if being merely “sufficient” is enough to win a national election in 2020, as it may well be, then the country has really lowered its collective expectations.

In America, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are disappearing from national politics; while individual communities are becoming ever redder or bluer in the political affiliations.

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But what’s the cause of this polarisation? Are Americans becoming more fanatical in their party loyalties? Not really, says Yascha Mounk in his column for The Atlantic. Quite the opposite, in fact:

“Far from increasing, Americans’ attachment to their political parties has considerably weakened over the past years.”

However, it appears that our decreasing attachment to our own side has been offset by increasing hostility to the other side – what Mounk calls “negative partisanship”.

Last year I looked at the theory that these two trends are related: the more our political heroes let us down, the more we have to see their opponents as villains. Psychologically, it allows us to maintain our loyalties despite the disappointment.

An alternative, or perhaps complementary, idea is that Republicans and Democrats each believe the other to be more extreme than they actually are.

As Mounk explains, a new report (from More in Common) has found that “Americans’ mental image of the ‘other side’ is a caricature:

“Asked to guess what share of Republicans believe that immigration can strengthen America so long as it is ‘properly controlled,’ for example, Democrats estimated about half; actually, nearly nine in ten agreed with this sentiment…

“…Republicans approximated that only about half of Democrats are “proud to be American” despite the country’s problems. Actually, over four in five Democrats said they are.”

And these are just two examples of the Perception Gap, which applies across a wide range of issues – from sexism to gun control.

The twist is that this doesn’t appear to be a function of ignorance. Quite the opposite in fact:

“Americans who rarely or never follow the news are surprisingly good at estimating the views of people with whom they disagree.”

As for formal education, the more highly educated a Democrat the more inaccurate their view of what Republicans believe. In the case of Republicans, education doesn’t appear to make things worse, but it doesn’t make it better either.

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Mounk calls these findings “deeply worrying”, but they accord with a growing pile of evidence that knowledge, education and expertise doesn’t necessarily broaden the mind.

So what’s going wrong? Part of the answer lies in a recent essay by Yancey Strickler called ‘The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet’.

The title is inspired by the Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin, who compares the universe to an eerily silent forest to explain the apparent lack of evidence for the existence of alien life. The forest is not in fact lifeless at all, but full of animals keeping quiet because “night is when the predators come out.” In other words, there’s plenty of aliens out there, but they’ve got the good sense not to advertise their presence.

Whether or not that’s true of the universe, Strickler argues that the internet is full of things best avoided:

“In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.”

The spaces where political issues are debated have got especially nasty. Therefore people who want to express an opinion without being torn to pieces do so in ‘digital refuges’ – where the internet’s predators can’t pounce. Podcasts are a good example:

“There, meaning isn’t just expressed through language, but also through intonation and interaction. Podcasts are where a bad joke can still be followed by a self-aware and self-deprecating save. It’s a more forgiving space for communication than the internet at large.”

Other examples include “newsletters… Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on.”

The trouble with these niches is that they’re hidden away – not just from the wolves, but just about everyone who doesn’t already belong to them. The internet (and political discourse more generally) is dividing not into echo chambers so much as disconnected hidey-holes. Reasonable people of different persuasions therefore don’t get to hear one another, and thus their perceptions of the other side are formed by their experience of the rampaging predators.

Away from the internet, other news media, campus culture and the most politicised professions, Democrats and Republicans get to interact in the context of everyday life – as opposed to an ideologically-charged slanging match. No wonder then that those most disconnected from these sources of political ‘information’ have a more accurate view of their fellow Americans.

Suggested reading

When eggheads are bigger idiots than meatheads

By Peter Franklin

Nevertheless, the fact that expanding one’s knowledge can be be so counter-productive is desperately sad.

What we need are more places and publications that provide viewpoint diversity within a civilised context. And, if nowhere else, that is something you can always find at UnHerd.